Passing Juice through Multiple Locations
-
Hey Gang,
Thank you in advance for taking some time out of your day to read/comment on this. I really am thankful for this awesome community.
SO, I just took over a locksmith client with over 20 different locations all up and down the west coast. They have some of their Google My Businesses ranking in the snap three. But most of them are not even close. The SEO that they had done was very 2012 and very messy. They have the name of the cities in their GMB profiles which is against google policy (although we haven't got taken down)
Example: Instead of Locksmith plus they have Locksmith Plus Portland or Locksmith Plus Seattle.
So their Citations are all over the place. Some locations have a bunch, and some locations I haven't even been able to put them on Yelp or Super pages (because they do not accommodate well at all for multi location business it's kind of been a nightmare)
And Besides mediocre citations their websites are all over the place to. None of them are Linked to each other they each look like a separate brand.
So here's my question(s)
1. I have a pretty good PBN network of my own real websites for clients that I have ranked to page one. I want to start Backlinking to just our one Main locksmith site (that ranks for no city) an have that juice flow into all the other sites but I am afraid I wont interlink them correctly and the juice will get wasted. Should I have like all the links to every cities website on the front page and point all my pbn at the front page? How to I link these bad boys correctly? Or should I... (next question)
2. Ok I know the Google my business does not care about how many citations we have but rather the quality of those citations. I already know we are having a brand crisis. We need to change all these listings to the same brand name but I am afraid google will spank us once we change and take down our number ones (so be it?)
But My question is how much should I focus on back linking some of these page listings. Like should I be posting the naked Yelp URL on some of my web 2.0s (that link back to my main website)? Or what if i just had the main citations on the cities website so they could get some juice too? Confusing!
Overall I know that Google wants clean consistent branding and that what we want to do.I just want to make sure everything is hooked up right so when I do make some Bad a** big content that every location can benefit from it.
Guys thank you again. Much Loves and I hope every body had a great new year. Here's to a strong 2016
-
Hi Meier,
I so urge you to take EGOL's advice as gold - he is legendary in his knowledge. The scenario you are describing with the PBN is not something that sounds safe or natural to either of us - so, this is your Moz squad talking here
It might help you to put yourself in a user's shoes. Does it actually benefit you, if you're looking for key grinding or to get let into your locked car to be thinking about pressure washing at that moment? No. There is no natural relationship there. Do you want to go, via a link, from a pressure washing site to a locksmith site or vice versa? No. There is simply no relationship there.
I also want to raise the issue here that the locksmith industry is one of the most notorious for its history of spam problems in the localsphere. Anything you do for clients in this industry is going to be in an atmosphere of heightened scrutiny (particularly at Google) and so a profile of unrelated, unnatural links would be just the sort of thing they'd be looking for to bring down the hammer.
So, please exercise caution here!
-
Ok let's restart
Hi i'm Meier
Let's Say I have just one local business owner that called me and said "hey bud! I really enjoyed your locksmith service yesterday, I have an awesome pressure washing business, do you mind if I write a quick article for you guys?"
And Im all like WAIT don't do it yet, lemme talk to my MOZ squad and make sure all my sites will benefit from the mention.
-
If this is a group of blogs and those blogs link to a network of clients, that is a spiderweb of links that might be identified by google as manipulative.
-
**I have never used questionable links - never will. Everything I have is real. **
-
Does anyone want to comment on the interlinking strategy?
I don't like it. Your comment (below) would send me running if I was one of your clients.
** I have a pretty good PBN network of my own real websites for clients that I have ranked to page one. **
Google hates blog networks. They take them down regularly. Sites that participate in them by receiving links get Penguin penalties that can toast your site for a yearf or longer.
Your clients might see their sites demoted so low that they get almost no traffic. Then they will be stuck with $5,000,000 in merchandise, a warehouse with a $15,000/month 5-year lease, and 12 employees that are fired.
That's my comment.
-
Does anyone want to comment on the interlinking strategy? I don't have fake websites, I have real clients with ok DA that are willing to link to the site naturally. How to I pass that juice right?
-
T.h.a.n.k.y.o.u.!!!!! That was some original content you wrote right there!
-
Happy New Year to you, Meier, and we're very happy you're part of the community
Wow - the scenario you are describing of a locksmith with multiple websites for 20 locations and NAP consistency issues is a tall order. You may receive totally different advice from other community members, but here's mine:
-
I would consolidate everything into a single website for this brand and permanently 301 redirect the old sites to the new one.
-
I would create a landing page for each of the 20 offices on the new website with the awesome content you are planning to build, rather than trying to split this up in 20 directions. This way, you are directly building the brand for all locations instead of trying to do it via some more circuitous method.
-
I would do (or hire out) a complete citation audit and invest $$$ in it to be sure all 20 locations are being audited.
-
I would read Joy Hawkins' tutorial, word for word, about duplicate detection: http://searchengineland.com/definitive-guide-duplicate-research-local-seo-238719. I would find, document and fix all duplicates possible.
-
I would then conduct a citation cleanup campaign. If I did it via a tool, I'd make darned sure everything was being caught and corrected. Anything not corrected, I'd fix manually. The beauty here would be that if you did steps 1 & 2 first, while cleaning up any bad NAP on the citations, you'd also be implementing the new landing page URL for each business location in its citation set. And, of course, complying to the letter with Google's guidelines as to naming conventions will be critical in this step.
-
Finally, I really don't know much about PBNs, apart from the problems surrounding them (see: https://moz.com/community/q/private-blogging-network , http://searchengineland.com/google-targets-sites-using-private-blog-networks-manual-action-ranking-penalties-204000, https://moz.com/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings etc.) I'm guessing that you are already aware of these problems, but just in case not, thought I'd mention. When it came to advising my own client, I would not recommend that a PBN be their link strategy, because I don't feel comfortable with representing one as what Google has been pretty clear about stating they want in terms of natural links. Rather, I'd aim for something like this: https://moz.com/blog/link-building-outreach-in-a-skeptical-world-whiteboard-friday and I'd aim to avoid mistakes like those shown here: https://moz.com/blog/the-rules-of-link-building-whiteboard-friday
Hope this helps and that you'll receive more feedback from the community!
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can I use Schema zip code markup that includes multiple zip codes but no actual address?
The company doesn't have physical locations but offers services in multiple cities and states across the US. We want to develop a better hyperlocal SEO strategy and implement schema but the only address information available is zip codes, names of cities and state. Can we omit the actual street address in the formatting but add multiple zipcodes?
Local Website Optimization | | hristina-m0 -
How to use canonical tags/hreflang for a company in multiple English-speaking countries?
My company is a global company with locations in AU, UK, and USA. Each has their own website. For example, we have https://www.catskill.us (for the USA), a https://www.catskill.com.au (for the AU), and https://www.catskill.co.uk (for the UK). I have used both canonical tags and hreflang tags for our USA website to distinguish any duplicate content from our AU and UK websites. I am wondering if I used the canonical tags and hreflang tags appropriatley in the below example for our USA website. Is it the best way to avoid link value loss? | |
Local Website Optimization | | joseph.defranco
| | |
| | |
| | |0 -
Local SEO case with two physical locations
I hope someone can help me make some decisions. I did read a lot about Local SEO lately but I’m not sure what way to go with this client. Client: Service provider with two physical locations (service is provided on the physical location). In the coming 12 month there will open 1-2 new physical locations in other cities. Has only one phone number. I will try to advise them to get a local phone number for both locations. But they prefer one (mobile) number to keep things simple. Clients are willing to travel for the service, since it’s a one day course they take. Current clients do come from a lot of different locations. The competition for around 5-6 big cities is pretty low since there aren’t a lot of service providers who deliver these courses. Questions: Should I put both addresses in the footer? It’s a best practice with only one location. I think it’s handy for users with two locations as well but I’m worried about how Google sees this. Also this will get confusing when the client passes 3-4 locations. If the client sticks with one mobile phone number, should I make a Google + local page for both physical locations? The Google guidelines clearly state they prefer a local number as much as possible. If I add “Our service areas “ to the top navigation and make a unique place page for every city (to rank organic aswell) is it wise to link those local Google + pages to the unique page about this service? Normaly I would go for yes, but I want to add places with and without a physical location under the same navigation. With just one location I would just focus on that city and add unique pages for the other pages. I’m getting a bit stuck between best practices since the client got opportunities with multiple strategies. I hope you guys (and girls 😉 ) can help!
Local Website Optimization | | Bob_van_Biezen1 -
Multi Location business - Should I 301 redirect duplicate location pages or alternatively No Follow tag them ?
Hello All, I have a eCommerce site and we operate out of mulitple locations. We currently have individual location pages for these locations against each of our many categories. However on the flip slide , this create alot of duplicate content. All of our location pages whether unique or duplicated have a unique title Tag, H1, H2 tag , NAP and they all bring in the City Name . The content on the duplicated content also brings in the City name as well. We have been going through our categories and writing unique content for our most popular locations to help rank on local search. Currently I've been setting up 301 redirects for the locations in the categories with the duplicated content pointing back to the category page. I am wondering whether the increase in number of 301's will do more harm than having many duplicate location pages ?.. I am sure my site is affected by the panda algorithm penalty(on the duplicated content issues) as a couple of years ago , this didn't matter and we ranked top 3 for pretty much for every location but now we are ranking between 8 - 20th depending on keyword. An Alternative I thought, may be to instead of 301 those locations pages with duplicate content, is to put No Follow tags on them instead ?... What do you think ?. It's not economically viable to write unique content for every location on every category and these would not only take years but would cost us far to much money. Our Site is currently approx 10,000 pages Any thoughts on this greatly appreciated ? thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Ecommerce Site with Unique Location Pages - Issue with unique content and thin content?
Hello All, I have an Ecommerce Site specializing in Hire and we have individual location pages on each of our categories for each of our depots. All these pages show the NAP of the specific branch Given the size of our website (10K approx pages) , it's physically impossible for us to write unique content for each location against each category so what we are doing is writing unique content for our top 10 locations in a category for example , and the remaining 20 odd locations against the same category has the same content but it will bring in the location name and the individual NAP of that branch so in effect I think this thin content. My question is , I am quite sure I we are getting some form of algorithmic penalty with regards the thin/duplicate content. Using the example above , should we 301 redirect the 20 odd locations with the thin content , or should be say only 301 redirect 10 of them , so we in effect end up with a more 50/50 split on a category with regards to unique content on pages verses thin content for the same category. Alternatively, should we can 301 all the thin content pages so we only have 10 locations against the category and therefore 100% unique content. I am trying to work out which would help most with regards to local rankings for my location pages. Also , does anyone know if a thin/duplicate content penalty is site wide or can it just affect specific parts of a website. Any advice greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Keywords with locations
I've seen quite a few threads that orbit around my questions, but none in the last year, so I'll ask it 🙂 I'm seeing some strange results when testing various keywords with and without locations included. For a foundation repair company in Indiana, we've optimized for all the big cities, since the company services the whole state. Here's a sample of weird stuff: Test 1: If I set my location (all other Google 'helps' turned off) to Indianapolis and search 'foundation repair' result is #3 'foundation repair indianapolis' result is #20 'indiana foundation repair' result is #18 Test 2: Location set to the small town the company is based in (Rossville, IN) 'foundation repair' result is #1 'foundation repair rossville' result is #3 behind other companies located in Rossville, GA, and Rossville, PA!! I suppose I was under the impression that the ip location data Google gathers would weigh more heavily than how place names are optimized as part of keywords (or just that the physical location would supplant the place name typed into the search if it happened to be the same). But according to these tests, it seems that inferred location is by far a secondary factor. I can deduce that we're more optimized than our competitors for 'foundation repair', but less optimized for keywords with place names in them (we feel like we'd be verging on stuffing if we did more). Am I missing something here? Has anyone else seen this sort of thing?
Local Website Optimization | | clearlyseo0 -
Same blog, multiple languages. Got SEO concerns.
Hi, My company runs a small blog in swedish. Most of the visitors are our customers/prospects. We will write about generic concepts regarding our business and the occasional company news story. However, I have quite a few ideas for articles that could be interesting to a lot of people, and I'm tempted to write those in english for better exposure. I would love it if that exposure could boost my companies authority. How should I go on about this? Can I somehow tell search engines that a certain part or page of the site is in another language? Should I translate our entire site to english and post the english post in a separate blog feed? Any insight is welcome. Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | Mest0 -
Separate Domains for Different Locations (in Different Cities)
We are in the process of building a new website for a client with locations in Tucson and Phoenix. Currently, they have one website that encompasses all locations, however, we are going to build them location specific websites (as many of the services are different between locations). Now my question is, as far as SEO goes, which one of these options would be the best? Option 1: Have separate domain names for each location. For example, StevesPetTucson.com and StevesPetPhoenix.com. _Pros: Easy to target specific, local keywords. Better looking domains. _ _Cons: Splits backlinks between two domains. _ Option 2: Setup StevesPet.com/Phoenix and StevesPet.com/Tucson. Pros: Keeps all backlinks pointing to one root domain. Note: We are going to use seperate WordPress installs for both websites, regardless of how we setup the domains. As we will be using different templates, menus and so on, we found this to be the best option. Thanks for any advice!
Local Website Optimization | | McFaddenGavender1