Passing Juice through Multiple Locations

[Meier]

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

[MiriamEllis]

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!

[Meier]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[Meier]

**I have never used questionable links - never will. Everything I have is real. **

[EGOL]

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.

[Meier]

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?

[Meier]

T.h.a.n.k.y.o.u.!!!!! That was some original content you wrote right there!

[MiriamEllis]

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:

1. I would consolidate everything into a single website for this brand and permanently 301 redirect the old sites to the new one.

2. 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.

3. I would do (or hire out) a complete citation audit and invest $$$ in it to be sure all 20 locations are being audited.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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!