Latest Questions

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  Targeting local areas without creating landing pages for each town
  

  I have a large ecommerce website which is structured very much for SEO as it existed a few years ago. With a landing page for every product/town nationwide (its a lot of pages). Then along came Panda... I began shrinking the site in Feb last year in an effort to tackle duplicate content. We had initially used a template only changing product/town name. My first change was to reduce the amount of pages in half by merging the top two categories, as they are semantically similar enough to not need their own pages. This worked a treat, traffic didn't drop at all and the remaining pages are bringing in the desired search terms for both these products. Next I have rewritten the content for every product to ensure they are now as individual as possible. However with 46 products and each of those generating a product/area page we still have a heap of duplicate content. Now i want to reduce the town pages, I have already started writing content for my most important areas, again, to  make these pages as individual as possible. The problem i have is that nobody can write enough unique content to target every town in the UK via an individual page (times by 46 products), so i want to reduce these too. QUESTION: If I have a single page for "croydon", will mentioning other local surrounding areas on this page, such as Mitcham, be enough to rank this page for both towns? I have approx 25 Google local place/map listings and grwoing, and am working from these areas outwards. I want to bring the site right down to about 150 main area pages to tackle all the duplicate content, but obviously don't want to lose my traffic for so many areas at once. Any examples of big sites that have reduced in size since Panda would be great. I have a headache... Thanks community.

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream

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  Data highlighter in WMT displays old version of page
  

  I want to mark up a business address for Google Local, so I thought I would use the data highlighter in WMT. However I only just added the address to the the bottom of the home page and when using data highlighter iit is giving me the old version of page to mark up without the address on. Rather frustrating, does any body have any experience on the time frame until Google updates the page in the data highlighter? According to this thread it's not even related to the page re caching:  Data Highlighter: Start link is pulling an old version of page

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian

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  Should ebook content be a download or hosted on site for SEO?
  

  We have written ebook(s) on subjects of interest to our prospects (B-C market). We have taken many recurring questions asked over the years plus helpful graphics and put into short 12+ page ebooks. After filling out form to receive ebook- (first name & email on form) for any option below- Should we: a) send them to Landing page to download ebook to their desktop? b) send them e-mail with link to download ebook? c) send them directly to page on our site with the ebook content? d) something else? My thoughts are to do c) which will put content on site, though 'protected' via gate. This way the search engines can crawl the content. However, if that content is not directly reachable through menu will that degrade the importance of that content? Obviously we want to provide good, helpful information to prospects. We would also love to benefit from that content from a Search point of view if possible. Anyone have experience with this through A/B test or otherwise? Thanks, Steve

  Whiteboard Friday | | PhotographerSteve

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  How long does it take for google to update title and metadata?
  

  I updated my site's title and description about a week ago, however for some reason it's still not reflected in google search results. Here's my site and try searching for 'shopious directory'. Any idea why this is? I tried looking at webmaster tool and it seems that google didn't have any errors. Why is it still showing the old data?

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | herlamba

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  The company brand name does not show in SERP
  

  Our company is ranking no.1 for brand keyword, however, when you try to find it by two words(with space between) then all those shows up and the website is nowhere to find. Any suggestions on how to solve this without the need to be ranked for something related

  On-Page Optimization | | GardenPet

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  Do you need a place to ditch bad links?
  

  This is not a question as such, more a gift 🙂 I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links. For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site: www.mydomain.com/viagra and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links. The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo! Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page. Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links. This bypasses the lengthy link removal process. Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed. And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site. As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too. I hope it helps some people.

  Link Building | | Matt_Wilson

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  How to optimize for local when client has a regus office?
  

  Anyone know how to optimize for local when client has a regus office? I heard it doesn't work so well because the offices are temporary and so many have used the same exact address over and over. True? Any way around it? Thanks!!

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck

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  Rebranding & Minimizing SEO impact
  

  Hello everyone, One of my clients is undergoing a major rebrand, which will require some substantial changes to their domain / URL structure. Primarily, we're going to: Move from a high-ish DA site to a low DA site Change the subdomain URL structure (more on that below) Update the content (copy, design, structure) on www. site to match the new brand The content on the subdomains should remain the same 301 redirect all pages from old site to new site where applicable The current site architecture makes great use of subdomains, which are also going to be changing in terms of name. So, we're moving from oldsubdomain.olddomain.com to newsubdomain.newdomain.com (and not oldsubdomian.olddomain.com to oldsubdomain.olddomain.com). The content / structure of these pages is going to change minimally. We understand that we're going to take an SEO hit overall, but are there things we can do to minimize this hit? Anyway we can 'estimate' the hit? Anyway we can educate our client to as to what to expect beyond (it is going to be bad…). Please let me know. Thanks!

  Branding | | 10SL

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  What is the best way to execute a geo redirect?
  

  Based on what I've read, it seems like everyone agrees an IP-based, server side redirect is fine for SEO if you have content that is "geo" in nature. What I don't understand is how to actually do this. It seems like after a bit of research there are 3 options: You can do a 301 which it seems like most sites do, but that basically means if google crawls you in different US areas (which it may or may not) it essentially thinks you have multiple homepages. Does google only crawl from SF-based IPs? 302 passes no juice, so probably don't want to do that. Yelp does a 303 redirect, which it seems like nobody else does, but Yelp is obviously very SEO-savvy. Is this perhaps a better way that solves for the above issues? Thoughts on what is best approach here?

  On-Page Optimization | | jcgoodrich

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  Google displays the wrong store hours. Can anyone help lead me to the fix?
  

  When doing the following search on Google "Ticket King Milwaukee hours" we see the wrong hours displayed at the top of the page. Just to the left of our places page, you will see "Tuesday hours 8:30-1:00 pm." That 1 pm closing comes up for every weekday, even though we are open until 6 pm weekdays, and 3 pm on Saturdays. I have checked the hours listed on our G+ page, our "Places for Business" page, our "about us" page on our website, and can't find where they are getting this incorrect data. I even went out and checked most of the "List your business" sites that I have registered with.
  I have submitted this to Google, but have not heard back. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can fix this, or at least find out where this bad data is coming from? I did find a company blog post from 2010 that listed our ours in a somewhat confusing way, but it was still correct. (I have since fixed that old post.)

  Branding | | Ticket_King

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  XML Sitemap on another domain
  

  Hi, We've rebuilt our website and created a better sitemap index structure. There's a good chance that we not be able to append the XML files to existing site for technical reasons (don't get me started). I'm reaching out because I'm wondering if can we place the XML files on another website or subdomain? I know this is not best practice and probably very grey but I'm looking for alternatives. If there answer is DON'T DO IT let me know too. Thx

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA

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  Problem to log into moz
  

  Every time the moz logs me out from the account and then I can not log in. It shows on the left side my name like I am logged in and then when I want go to community suddenly I am not logged in. It offen shows 502 error. It was first doing on firefox, then I manage to log in chrome and now I had to log in private browsing.

  Moz Pro | | Rebeca1

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