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We routinely link from our blog to product pages, landing pages, and content silo pages. As long as you do it naturally you'll be fine. We have a standard of our internal links being "helpful" to the user experience to help guide our team. For example, let's say its a product review blog article. It would make sense to link from that article to the actual product. What doesn't make sense is linking to that product from a blog article with content that is not related is rather "spammy" if you will.

You can invoke Google's eye if you're internal linking is clearly spamming, but this would result in lost rankings over time because your content does not serve users' search intent or answer their query, if that makes sense. In terms of a magic number of what is considered too much, there's no telling. I view it as more of a ratio instead of a hard figure. Long story short, keep the linking natural and make sure it helps the user solve their search query and you'll be fine.

I feel that it is a big benefit. Essentially with popular plugins like Yoast's WordPress plugin, work by listing your website and not the youtube link. If you're looking to convert traffic on your website, why send users to youtube?

Thanks for this information! All of the support agents I spoke with told me that it was not possible. They were all extremely professional, but perhaps they didn't understand what I was asking. I'm glad to hear there is a way to make it happen. WPE is a great platform for us.

Just thought I'd shoot an update - according to WPEngine the redirect will always be there. No way around it on their platform.

Hi guys,

Had a quick question that I wanted to verify here. After reviewing a Moz report we received some redirect chain error on all of our sites hosted with WPEngine. We noticed that the redirect chain appears to be coming from how the domains are configured in their control panel.

Essentially, there is a redirect:

• from staging/temp -> to live
• from non-www -> to www
• SSL redirect from http -> https

The issue here is that the non-www is redirecting to www and then redirected again to https://www

According to support the only way to get rid of this error is to drop the www version of the domain and to host everything under https://domain.com. To me it seems very odd that you cannot just go from http://non-www to https://www in just 1 301 redirect.

Has anyone else experienced this or am I just not looking at the situation correctly?

Well if I understand who did what in your example, your page is missing quite a bit of information that the other client did place on site. Yoast's local plugin is designed to fill in the schema gaps between what your client did and what you have started to do. I think that may be where the difference in opinion is coming in.

Here's some videos on the basics that should go on the location pages that you're trying to setup: http://moz.com/academy/local-content

I would also recommend that you visit Mike's blog: http://blumenthals.com/blog/

Essentially you need to apply schema to what your client set up there. Perhaps also a bit more original content on each page, but you get the idea. Don't forget to place hours of operation, address info, etc. on each location page. It might also be a good idea to put the location info in the footer with the proper schema markup in place. Yoasts plugin just helps you do this a little easier than with coding it yourself.

I would think working on the page that ranks currently would be better than starting over, but I suppose that all depends on budget, competition, etc.

We just underwent the same thing (Joomla 2.5 to latest Wordpress version.  Here was our process:

PRE-LAUNCH

1. BACKUP - BACKUP - BACKUP
2. Note all current urls, eventually launched new site on the same server (IP address) as the old Joomla site.
3. Duplicated site on a private server under Wordpress CMS. This way we can run the site with full url and not a subdomain or subdirectory url structure. For us this allowed us to hone in on issues and keep things clean. We did play with our hosts file to see the site when doing the build out.
4. Transferred all content over, retaining EXACT url usage. This did take some tweaking because Joomla's menu structure creates so many different ways to serve up the same content. We also kept all meta descriptions/ titles in place. An old developer used to fill out the meta keyword box, we stripped all of that junk. We moved all of the old joomla articles in categories and subcategories to Wordpress' blog structure. That was a lot of work (we had like 1000 pages or so).
5. Updated onsite content to be more professional (better spelling, grammar, and copy in general). For the most part we kept the same content though. We did update images with the same title, alt, description tags. The old images just sucked.
6. Updated to a much faster, better responsive framework. This cleaned up the code quite a bit. We added some plugins like Yoast SEO (with local, video, and authorship markup).
7. Ran multiple sweeps with ScreamingFrog and Xenu to find and fix broken links. There were a ton because joomla can sometimes append urls with php tags pointing to the database content instead of the SEF url. [Another lovely joomla feature. - I used to be a big fan of Joomla]
8. Killed off duplicate pages using 301 redirects to updated content.
9. Ensured physical locations had their own pages, proper schema markup, location data in the footer, and verified locations within Google local business center.

POST LAUNCH

1. For whatever reason we still had like 300 or so 404 errors in GWT. We watch it like a hawk. Additionally, our duplicate description and title tags shot up as well. We also received a message in GWT telling us that our site was still on Joomla 1.5.  We were like wth?!
2. Fixed all 404 errors with 301 redirects in our htacccess file. Never thought I would see so many redirects!
3. Resubmitted index to Google/ fetched as google. Then waited for index results.
4. Duplicate HTML / description warnings in GWT are now falling off every day. We expect the old Joomla 1.5 warning to go away as well. Essentially, we had a duplicate cache issue going on. As Google reindexes the site everything is falling back in place.
5. Watch GWT, Moz Analytics, other sources like a hawk every day to immediately handle issues. Made sure schema was pulling correctly in GWT.

Rankings initially slipped 1-2 spots overall. However, once the errors were fixed the bounced right back (took about 3 days, maybe less). Additionally, we increased the overall quality of the links pointing to the site as well as better quality content in the ongoing campaigns.

Overall we were initially penalized (not a real penalty) because of so many errors. However, once those errors were fixed and reindexed by Google, we were fine again. This was just organic. Our map rankings did not slip a single position.

Hope this helps!

Howdy Moz,

Just received a message in Google Webmaster Tools about a CMS update:

"Joomla Update Available

As of the last crawl of your website, you appear to be running Joomla 1.5. One or more of the URLs found were:

http://www.website/custom-url/article5034

Google recommends that you update to the latest release. Older or unpatched software may be vulnerable to hacking or malware that can hurt your users. To download the latest release, visit the Joomla download page. If you have already updated to the latest version of Joomla, please disregard this message.

If you have any additional questions about why you are receiving this message, Google has provided more background information in a blog post about this subject."

Read through the associated blog post. According to the post a generator meta tag is created in Joomla that notes the CMS version. Here's the oddity:

The site was on Joomla 1.5 over 2 years ago. 1 Year ago it was updated to Joomla 2.5. About a week ago it was converted completely to Wordpress. According to GWT the last date the Google bot accessed the site was the day before (5/1/14) the email.

I went through the code, css/html, and the database and found no reference of Joomla 1.5.

Has anyone seen this message? If so, how did you rectify it? Were there any adverse effects on rankings?

Sure does make sense! Quick question about the source of the review. You always want to get testimonials from clients as reference of your good work. However, these are self generated while reviews are done independently. Is it proper to use the testimonials or the review?

If testimonial, how do most handle ratings?

If it is the review, what about potential duplicate content issues?

Thanks for all of the education!

Howdy Moz,

Still kind lost of review markup and the best way to get it implemented into a Wordpress site. Any suggestions on a good tutorial that walks you through the process?

Any thoughts on how schema markup should properly implemented on service base businesses? Let's say a plumber in Washington has a few locations. Obviously you would use schema mark up on their physical location information, but what about service areas?

Are there ramifications to using the for service areas? It seems like you could potentially confuse the search engines. We are noticing a competitor use this on a newly developed website. We haven't seen any improvement in their rankings per say, but it may be a bit early to tell.

Thank you for being so blunt with #2! There still seems to be a disconnect (of sorts) between publishing great content and "old-fashioned" link building.

While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs.

I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though.

Any thoughts on why this might happen?

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We're actually looking at the same thing as well, except with a travel company in the US. I'll be honest and say that most of our research is showing that it will be difficult to do, especially without a physical location in those cities. Typically, you'll have a local page for every physical location with unique local content.

1. Aggregation and duplicate content will hurt, especially on pages that you are trying to funnel traffic to. Try to offset that with a lot of unique content on the page.

2. Depending on how the agency structured and the actual business relationship, there is a bit of grey area here. Meaning that often smaller companies will act as business partners for local companies. Typically, they will be subsidiaries. Now, I'm not up on the technicality with Google about it, but if they are legally tied together then it may be possible to use their physical location. But I'm willing to bet there will be big issues with business names and listings this way. Someone with more experience may be able to better answer this one, but this is bordering on a spammy tactic. It can be a hard balance at times, especially with service based companies in surrounding small cities.

I would probably recommend that this real estate firm get a physical location in the area in which they want to rank, even a small closet of a location. Here's where internet marketing and business development meet and I love it. If the potential revenue earned from selling those listings in those cities is worth it, then they should be able to find a physical location at a great price (they are real estate pros afterall). That will give you the tools you need to get them ranked in that city. Simple math will tell them if investment, overhead, revenue, and potential profit are worth it. For me, I use this and even sit down with my clients to crunch numbers. If they have their eyes set on "anything and everything" without thinking about it fully, this little tip can help manage the client expectations (I hate saying "lowering their expectations").

3. The address could help build out local content, but if you're aggregating the properties it wouldn't necessarily matter anyways. *I assume the aggregation is coming from some kind of MLS database or regional resource. If not, and again, there is a bit of legal and ethical issues, if you can manually enter all of those properties with unique content that would be best, but typically that is not the case with most real estate solutions.

Other than that I think you're best bet is to rank for the "domain.com/area-you-want" and try to outrank the competition organically. I'm interested if anyone has found a viable strategy to a problem like this. Latest search updates have given a lot of priority to localized results. My research has not shown much is overcoming it and that is primarily due to anti-spam measures and trying to better understand user intent.  Hope this points both you and I in the right direction!

Google is increasing cracking down on bad local results. However, in many regions of the US there are twin cities or cities that reside next to each other, like Minneapolis-Saint Paul or Kansas City. According to Google guidelines your business should only be listed in the city in which your business is physically located.

However, we've noticed that results just outside of the local map pack will still rank, especially for businesses that service the home. For example, let's say you have a ACME Plumbing in Saint Paul, MN. If you were to perform a search for "Plumbing Minneapolis" you typically see local Minneapolis plumbers, then Saint Paul outliers. Usually the outliers are in the next city or just outside of the Google map centroid.

Are there any successful strategies to increase rank on these "Saint Paul outliers" that compete with local Minneapolis results or are the results always going lag behind in lieu of perceived accuracy? We're having to compete against some local competitors that are using some very blackhat techniques to rank multiple sites locally (in the map results). They rank multiple sites for the same company, under different company names and UPS store addresses. Its pretty obvious, especially when you see a UPS store on the street view of the address!

We're not looking to bend the rules, but rather compete safely. Can anything be done in this service based scenario?

Howdy Moz!

Let's say we have a client out of Washington called "Acme Plumbing".  Of course they rank #1 for their own brand, but the trouble we found is directly above in the PPC section.

It appears that a competitor is targeting the brand by including some of the branding in the ad itself.  Specifically, it has the following format:

Acme Plumbing - Quality and Affordable Plumbing Service
acme.contractorreferral.net/plumbing
Submit zip code for free estimate

Clicking on the link takes you directly to a lead generation form.  Considering the protection on the name (), is this ethical or even legal?  Or do we just have competitor that found a sneaky way to try to divert traffic? Google's guidelines are clear about violations.  What about general branding, especially with established companies and regional brands?

A good question - From my end; I have several clients with keyword rich urls.  They do not seem negatively affected.  That being said, most of the clients have the keyword in their actual business name, like ACME Plumbing. However, even the ones that do not, have not been negatively affected.  Depending on your client's name I would try to drop the " - " in the domain and push it all together : brandbianalytics.com

+1 to GWT.  You may also want to check your server logs.  I recommend using keyword spy as another general place to get that information.  http://www.keywordspy.com

I think you're looking for this: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Generally speaking no.  You can set up multiple report generations with custom reports, but your site is generally crawled once per week.  You can use other tools like screamingfrog to help track down errors.  GWT is also another good source, but only updates once per week as well.  Once you get the errors out of your system, you'll not want to be bothered that many times a week (I would suspect).

Perhaps, you may want a manual crawl: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

We discovered this as well.  What implications do you think this makes for lead generation and web marketing as whole?

A high number of sites use social like/share buttons directly under or around the content piece in an effort to share or like a piece of content.  If that schema does not translate or correlate into likes for a specific piece of content while a user is browsing on the website and only if they actually visit the facebook page, is there a point to even having these icons in the first place any more?

Shouldn't the freed space be better utilize if there are no benefits for the likes in this manner?

PS. Sorry for responding to such an old Q&A!

Another very helpful answer - thank you.  Moving forward, I still think the best approach is one website at the end of the day.  After all, the saying is that it is better to mine one mine deep than to mine several at the same time.

In this particular niche, service industries like plumbing have exact match domains with less notable content.  We're still working on the ability to offset this advantage they appear to have.

Thanks again!

I think these are great guidelines and recommendations.  Quick question though - what if a small business has multiple locations and a different phone number at each location?  Would it serve any purpose to have a microsite for these locations which are also branded accordingly?

Another strategy I see commonly used are subdomains under the main umbrella site.  Any thoughts on that one?  The client really wants to take up more space on the search results.  So I want to make sure that we do a legit and unique approach to this.  It may be that we instead create niche landing pages on the main site like:

acmeplumbing.com/sacramentoplumbingwarranty

Where this page is a specific section dedicated to plumbing warranties, faqs, warranty changes, newsworthy stories, etc.  That way we continue the size of the site and keep our efforts focused in 1 place.  One our main challenges is that competitors are finding ranking opportunities using keyword specific urls and different google voice phone numbers attached to the same business and location.

Howdy Moz,

Over and over we hear of folks using microsites in addition to their main brand for targeting keyword specific niches.  The main point of concern most folks have is either in duplicate content or being penalized by Google, which is also our concern.  However, in one of our niches we notice a lot of competitors have set up secondary websites to rank in addition to the main website (basically take up more room on the SERPS).  They are currently utilizing different domains, on different IPs, on different servers, etc.  We verified because we called and they all rang to the same competitors.

So our thought was why not take the fight to them (so to speak) but with a branding and content strategy.  The company has many good content pieces that we can utilize, like company mottos, missions statements, special projects, community outreach that can be turned into microsites with unique content.

Our strategy idea is the take a company called "ACME Plumbing" and brand for specific keywords with locations like sacramentoplumberwarranty.com where the site's content revolves around plumber warranty info, measures of a good warranty, plumbing warranty news (newsworthy issues), blogs, RCS - you get the idea...and send both referral traffic and link to the main site.

The ideal is to then repeat the process with another company aspect like napaplumbingprojects.com where the content of the site is focused on cool projects, images, RCS, etc. Again, referring traffic and link juice to the main site.

We realize that this adds the amount of RCS that needs to be done, but that's exactly why we're here.  Also, any thoughts of intentionally tying in the brand to the location so you get urls like acmeplumbingsacarmento.com?

I agree with you from an SEO standpoint it quickly seems like overkill.  From a content marketing perspective though it does seem endless the amount of content you could produce.  In my own research I think I found a very helpful blog post with some ideas: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-build-a-content-marketing-strategy

I think what I'm lacking is a more directed approach to the entire strategy.

SEO has really moved away from the nitty gritty analysis of backlinking factors, link wheels, and the like and has shifted to a more holistic marketing approach.  That approach is best described around MOZ as “Real Company S#it”.  RCS is a great way to think about what we really do because it is so much more than just SEO or just Social Media.

However, our clients and business owners do want to see results and want it quantified in some way.  The way most of our clients understand SEO is by ranking high on specific terms or online avenues they have a better possibility of generating traffic/sales/revenue.  They understand this more from the light of traditional marketing, where you pay for a TV ad and then measure to see how much revenue that ad generated.

In the light of RCS and the need to target a large number of keywords for a given client, how do most PROs handle this situation; where you have a large number of keywords to target but with RCS?

Many I’ve asked tend to use the traditional approach of creating a single content piece that is geared towards a given target keyword.  However, that approach can get daunting if you have say 25 keywords that a small business wants to target.  In this case is not really a case of scaling down the client expectations?

What if the client wants all of the keywords and has the budget?  Do you just ramp your RCS content creation efforts?  It seems that you can do overkill and quickly run out of RCS content to produce.

What was your solution?  Did you end up bringing everything in house to recover?  We had to do that in the backlinking area and for original written content in order to make a comeback.  It is still touch and go to this day though as we're still in recovery mode too.

+1 to Chris.  I've had nothing but low value, spammy links.  In fact many of those spammy links were lost with the latest Google update and caused our rankings to drop. To find someone to manage that many different campaign keywords is going to be tough, especially over seas.  I find that they do not have access to the same resources like we have here at MOZ.

In fact most of the time I ended up providing the exact instructions for what I wanted to do.  Hopefully it doesn't come across poorly, but there seemed to be no independent thinking into the backlinking strategy either.  I mean there were no links built from industry leaders, trusted manufacturers, guest blogging opportunities, etc.  All just directory postings and profile builds on random websites.  And for a regional service provider (US based company), I feel that links built on websites outside of the US are not even relevant.

In my opinion the person you are looking for may need to be an in-house employee.  You can still use contractors to help on other parts of your project.  But  especially something like social media engagement, you may want to shy away from over seas developers.

All that being said and done - if it works, it works.  Best of luck in finding that special person - good help is hard to find!

+1 to Davanur.  We use the same frameworks and core blocks of code across several sites.  When the functionality is identical it clearly makes development a little easier because you don't have to reinvent the wheel each and every time.  However, it is only the content that matters in SE eyes.  Otherwise, everyone other person on here with the wordpress or joomla theme would get crushed by penalties because of a lot of the themes use the same frameworks like Gantry, Warp, Zend, etc.

I believe best practice is to always canonicalize to the original content.  However, the mix of the original content within those blog pages is tricky because I'm sure a lot has to do with how much content is duped.

Have you tried running any reports for duplicate content issues?  I know Moz has some great tools and one of my favorites is Screaming Frog Spider.  Have you also looked at your GWT to see what if any issues Google may have?

Duplicate content can be bad, but there are a few cases with transcriptions that we've recently discovered where penalties are non-existent.  One of the recent lessons we learned was from a similar thread about video transcriptions.  Phil in the post submitted some good links and research to back it all up.

Here's the link to that discussion: http://moz.com/community/q/video-seo-youtube-transcriptions-dupe-content
I hope this points you in the right direction!

Sorry - guess I did not read your question correctly.  I believe the general rule of thumb is that it would be considered duplicate content.  I went through MOZ's youtube and it appears that they write original content for the video description and save the transcription for onsite only.  I currently do the same thing and have not noticed any penalties.  Hopefully this helps a little bit.

I've thought of this myself actually.  However, I do not believe it is counted as duplicate content (at least not for now).  For example, MOZ does whiteboard Fridays, which are awesome, and they certainly use a transcript for content beneath the embedded video. Example

I could see this eventually being a duplicate content issue and penalty in the future if the strategy is abused, but I think the necessity for the hearing impaired and accessibility issues might prevent this from being an all out penalty.

My limited logic and conclusions are that you are safe for now, but may need to change the content up in the future if SEs decide to penalize this type of activity.  Just my 2 cents!

That #RCS talk was awesome!  Thanks a bunch for that recommendation.  We've really worked hard on this with the client and they are fully on board with RCS - the CEO built the company on it.  Very interestingly, I had not considered the brand consolidation strategy (asking for a link back from lifted website content).  We are definitely excited about using that as a new outlet for link building, allowing others to do the work for us organically.

We found a particular client that was using a 3rd party backlinker to build links (they were outsourced).  The backlinks appeared to be low quality, just basic text and no substantial content surrounding it, usually like a forum profile.  The backlinker was swapped out.

However, we've been suffering from a big loss of links.  We anticipated that quite a few of the links the previous crew were managing would be lost, however, we've lost over 1500.  Some of that is due to the former SEO company using sitesays.com as part of their strategy.

That site has since removed all listings/links because they were hit by recent algorithm changes.  Every week GWT has fewer and fewer links coming from that site.  We expect this to continue until GWT has removed all links from that site.  We are also losing ground (quickly) on local rankings too.  We believe this is due to the high number of links lost.

What is best practice when building links to counter this issue?  Is there anything that can be done to stem the link purge and, if possible, gain ground on rankings again?

I also wanted to put in a little update that we've noticed in this niche particularly.  When we follow the basic outline of the strategy above, we notice that the onsite article gets ranked quickly, while the target landing page drops off out of results for about half a day.  No later than the next day is the landing page back in place and the onsite (blog article if you will) is removed from rankings.

I suppose this is just the Google shuffle or something similar happening.  Fortunately we've removed all but 8 errors (out of 3000) and we're just waiting for GWT to update to reflect that information.

I just saw that as well - good eye!

Todd,

I really think you're right on every point there.

1.  We have been looking at the backlink profile pretty good.  It appears that the first SEO company was just starting out with this site so I see a quite a few paid link directories that were popular a few years back.  Fortunately, a big chunk of them have stopped out of violation and the links are slowly being de-indexed altogether.  I imagine that the both the quality and loss of the links is hurting us while things sort and readjust.  Once all of the links are removed from the index, I believe we can cross this portion of the list (for now - must remain ever vigilant).

2.  In progress - takes a bit of time.  We're also trying to make sure that the citations are built on local IPs as well.

3.  I agree - fortunately the anchor text is varied so I believe that we will be ok here as well.  We are updating any gregarious usage of exact match anchor text as well.

4. This was one of the few things that the last SEO company did correctly.  The internal link structure is definitely varied.

Thanks for your help on these suggestions.  Our client has a pretty good decent branding scheme so its a nice way to build links with that anchor text and variations to use.

Hi,

We're working with a local service provider with a location specific keyword (not a real example: "orlando plumbing contractors").

Background:
In recent history the client updated a new site design and upgraded from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5.  Of course there were duplicate content issues which have been resolved with the help of AceSEF. Duplicate content, title tags, and other content issues are handled as soon as they appear in GWT or MOZ.

Additionally, a high number of backlinks were lost when the latest Google update hit.  Many of these sites were of sites that no longer existed or were spammy and flushed out.  Some were lost due to the previous SEO firm literally removing backlinks and switching them to their new client (seo firm was putting all of the work the client paid for under their name to control everything).

Current Situation: The backlink loss seems to have been stopped (hopefully) because we are using a new strategy that relies solely on the quality of the links, surrounding text, varied anchor text, relevancy, etc.)  However, we tried an experiment on just one of the clients keywords.  That experiment seems to have blown up in our faces evidently.

The landing page for the location specific keyword  has dropped from the index completely (it seems), but only when searching broad.  When using exact match with quotes like the example quoted above ("orlando plumbing contractors") the landing page appears, but several ranks lower.  We were ranked yesterday 6/23/13, but as of today 6/24/13 are no longer ranked.

On broad matches, non-relevant sites and even a site that shows only a broken server configuration is outranking the client (they appear for the broad search, but the client does not).

What Was Done
We recently created a press release for and posted it on a press release site.  We then created a link back to the landing page (exact match anchor text).  We posted the PR article to several social sites (Google plus, folkd, delicious, twitter, stumble upon, diigo).

We also created a blog article (on-site) on site for that, creating links back to the landing page (the links all had exact anchor text).  We posted that blog article to social news sites (facebook, stumble, delicious) and included a ping.  The PR article was manually rewritten and posted to the PR site (we had to make 2 versions of the PR; one for the blog and one for the PR site).

The Result
The client ending up dropping off the broad search rankings, but only slipped a few for "exact match" (with quotes).  The PR article that was created is now ranked on page 3 for the board keyword and is still beat by non working sites.

We suspect that the exact anchor text could be causing this problem.  Anyone else have an idea (we're scratching our heads and trying not to freak out at the same time).