Geo content and where Googlebot crawls from.
-
Does anyone have experience with geo-specific content on their homepage and how the location of the Googlebot impacts rank and/or traffic?
I ask because looking in Search Console today, I noticed the thumbnail image of our site is different than usual and it was pulling in a specific geo-location and wondered if there is any value/concern on how Google sees our site from different locations and if it could impact SERP's.
-
Google is location-agnostic, though will act like it cares about location depending on the location of the search. If it pulled the wrong thumbnail for you, it got there via a link (internal or external) and felt that is an appropriate result. What you do now depends on your goal (change the thumbnail for example).
It's good that you appear with a geo-targeted piece of content. This means you're responding to local searches. Google will show different SERP results for every person and location, so there isn't much value/concern over how they see your site. They see it from "all" locations.
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
-
New business / content marketing
Hi all SEO experts, if a website is brand new, so published in the last 3 months- new domain name and website design. We have rebranded recently, using a new domain as entered new business partnership, there doesn’t seem to be much guidance on this at all, from various SEO websites, so our question is would you delay publishing new blog posts / content marketing as frequently because the company website is brand new? So would SEO’s decrease the frequency of publication of blog posts, because the website is new? Or perhaps it does not matter, and would still post every week as you would if the website has been live for a long time? So, in nutshell, what we are wondering is, is the “Google Sandbox” still in use?
Local SEO | | Ryan070 -
Category pages are treated as duplicate content - is that a problem?
Hi there I have analyzing a webshop where we sell products for pets, gardening and the like. I am getting a lot of "Duplicate Content" alerts from Moz when doing a site crawl and I am told that the pages for e.g. cat products and gardening tools show duplicate content. Those two pages contain no identical products, so I am guessing that it is just the "set up" of the page (they look almost identical, except for the products). My question is: Is this really a problem? Does it affect my ranking in a negative way, and if so, how can I counter it? Best regards Frederik
Local SEO | | fhertzp0 -
Any benefit of Geo Targeting in Organic Positions?
Hi All, Can anyone please guide me on Geo Targeting for Google Organic Improvement? Thanks!
Local SEO | | wright3350 -
Duplicate content across a number of websites.
We have a client who has approximately 25 retail sites (mini department stores) selling in general the same merchandise ranges - some stores carry all the ranges (brands) while others have fewer due to space restrictions. Each destination is different has its own branding and unique selling point which needs to be reflected. The client wants us to build individual websites for each location as they want to promote each location individually. I know that the search engines don't penalise duplicate content, but the core of each website is going to be essentially the same. My concern is there is no way you could write 25 different pages about the same Colony Candle range! Any ideas suggestions would be much appreciated - a one site option would not work as the client wants individual website and due to the different branding, USP and the fact they want to market them individually I would agree with them. Thanks Fraser
Local SEO | | fraserhannah0 -
What can I do to rank higher than low-quality low-content sites?
We lost our site in an actual meltdown at our hosting provider in January, and decided to do a new site instead of bring back a dated backup. So we've only been "active" at our URL since about May. That said, I have not seen any irregular or unexpected penalties. Not showing up is natural if you have literally nothing to show. We have had a site since then, though, and while it isn't going to win any award, we've built it with best practices using sites like this, trying to use natural, helpful, actual language to convey what we do and why we do it (we're web developers for small business making WordPress sites). Paying attention to titles, keyword frequency and variability, alt tags, etc. Always erring on the conservative side. While we build sites for people across the country (and a few in places like the UK), we just moved into an actual office space in our hometown so it's never been more important to push our visibility locally. We've just come back on the scene, in relative terms, so there's no expectation we'll crack the top five or ten; they all have teams of people and bags of capital and have been around many, many years, plus they link to the dozens upon dozens of sites they have done and promote their appearances in press releases and such. Their content is not bad, and most of it is good and not spammy. They are being genuine. That said, we're in the late 40s to late 50s right now. Happy to show up at all, but after that first group of legitimate sites, there are automatically generated webpages (which I thought couldn't even be listed...one is an MP3 download site that mentions one of the top companies in the page title, and just has a random video on the page) local companies touting themselves as SEO "experts" that say things like "Here at Company X, we work hard to bring you the best Rochester, NY web design in the hopes that when you make your Rochester, NY web design decisions, you'll think of us first Rochester, NY web design." I changed the company name and the location, but that's an actual line from their site job listings from places like Craigslist and Indeed hair stylists dentists (?!) Our code validates, we've incorporated Schema for our addresses, our site is usually fast (650ms to 1.3s in Pingdom from Dallas). We don't do any redirecting, our metas likes everyone else's don't count for ranking but are thoughtfully produced, we pay attention to using concise and accurate URLs without stop words, etc. There are also very very few resources loaded on a given page. That said, there's not a lot on the blog that's new and all told we have I think 13 total pages including a few posts. Is it even possible to get close to the actual pack if we, for example, posted more regularly? I was just reading here about how we shouldn't put our links in the site footers of our clients (which we don't always anyway), so I have them only as branded links, only on the homepages, and only on sites that, when crawled, didn't have nonzero spam scores (everyone else has a nofollow link in our portfolio). I realize this is a super generic question but I wasn't quite sure how to search out this particular use case given that our aspirations are so basic...just trying to figure out if there's something obvious we're missing and shooting ourselves in the foot over. A thousand pledges of gratitude! (if this is too common and I just didn't see a duplicate, let me know and I will delete it or ask for it to be deleted....also, I don't want to appear spammy so I am not linking to my site unless it's absolutely necessary...not sure what protocol is...I'm pretty self-aware so I do believe everything I've said above is true).
Local SEO | | eaglenestmedia1 -
Google's Geo Search Setting Gone Cuckoo!
Hey Everybody! I thought I'd post about this because pretty much all of our members who do Local SEO are bound to run into this. Last week, when I was in the middle of training someone, I ran into something bizarre. Using Google's search settings to set my location to a remote locale, the local packs were returning me results for the correct city, but the organic results accompanying the pack were showing me results that appeared to be based on my own IP address instead ... in other words, Google was overriding my designated geolocation in favor of where it knows I'm actually located. I was relieved to see Mike Blumenthal post on this (helped me realize I wasn't going crazy - haha) and I recommend that everyone who does Local for a living take a look: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/05/24/google-location-results-still-screwy/ I also recommend checking out this G+ convo going on between John Mueller and others: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TerrySimmonds/posts/1BZ6guvy9mE John's initial thought was that nothing has changed ... but something has definitely changed. Do some of your own searches and see what you come up with. Main takeaway here is that if you are trying to approximate clients' rankings in cities not your own, the results you are seeing may be very weird right now. Not sure if this is a temporary glitch or the forerunner to some change coming our way. This is a story to stay on top of, for sure. What do you you all see?
Local SEO | | Moz.HelpTeam0 -
How Do We Satisfy Similar Content Needs For 3 States Without Sounding... Umm... Silly.
Hi Gang, Background: We're a multi-state personal injury law firm with offices in IN, MI, and NM. Michigan and New Mexico used to have their own individual subdomain under 2keller.com, but we recently combined them so that all of our locations were represented in one mega-site. Problem: Our practice areas include the usual array of plaintiff's law categories, e.g., Car Accidents, Defective Drugs, Motorcycle Accidents, etc. We want to write honest, useful content for each practice area in each state, but it becomes a bit challenging not to duplicate some of these pages. In many instances there are minor differences between the states with regard to things like what we can offer clients, what a client's rights are, how a client is compensated, etc. Even individual state laws are also very similar in most cases. Question: Any ideas how we can avoid sounding duplicitous? Or does anyone have a suggestion about an effective way we might go about tackling the three states in a manner different from the one we have chosen? Or does it matter? Any input would be appreciated! Wayne
Local SEO | | Wayne760 -
Content Across International Websites
I am wondering if anyone could clear up some questions I have regarding international SEO and how to treat the content placed on there. I have recently launched several websites for a product internationally, each with the correct country domain name etc and I have also followed the guidelines provided by webmaster tools on internationalisation. All the websites are targeted towards English speaking countries and I have rewritten most of the of the content on there to suite the English style of the targeted country. This is being said however I am finding mixed bags of information on what to do in treating large chunks of potential duplicate content. For example my main .com website which has been running several years (and is targeted to the UK) has a lot of well written articles on there which are popular with the visitors. I am needing to find out if duplicating these articles onto the international versions of the websites, without rewriting them, would have a detrimental effect on SEO between all the sites. I have done a site search for each domain name to see if they are cropping up in other local Google versions (e.g .ca site in Google.com.au etc) and they are not. Does this mean Google is localised to its results regarding duplicate content or is it treated at the root level? Any information to point me in the right direction would be a big help.
Local SEO | | Rj-Media0