Welcome to the Q&A Forum

So you probably already read that so far as adding the business to Google local is concerned, PO boxes are violation of Google local quality guidelines - if you read through them, they are looking for places that receive customers and they specifically state that post office boxes aren't considered physical locations. So if you add them as a listing to Google local, they get deleted, sometimes .. pretty often (there are still some listings with PO boxes but I wouldn't bother trying). And you want your website address/phone etc to match your local listing for good local SEO. So although you could add the various PO boxes to the website, I don't think it will help for local, there's probably no real point them being on there unless they have some legitimate business use and I wouldn't recommend it.

I've mused recently (in a blog post) that using virtual offices combined with local area code numbers (e.g. forwarded to the main sales number) might work for boosting local, but only if the business centre allows use of the address rather than the PO box address. If you had the virtual office address but didn't have local matching numbers, I think that'd be a potential negative for local.  I think there's an element of risk here as virtual offices aren't too difficult to spot and let's face it, it is still against the quality guidelines and trying to manipulate results etc. I'd kind of be interested to know if it'd work but I wouldn't try it for a client myself!

Things the client can do instead -

• Use his one business address, phone etc, same on local listing as on website, and then,

• Specify in his Google local listing which areas he covers. Rather than stating the whole of the UK, I'd recommend adding those specific areas he wants to rank for.

• Create pages for those areas around what people search for e.g. going for the organic results 'electrician services in lincoln' etc as Google does still feature these around the local listings.

• Add location specific content for that area - eg. case studies, testimonials for companies / customers in that area with plenty of refs to the location.

Hope that helps.

Hi Alan,

Hmm I don't see their logic in saying the value of good links would be reduced.  It's true that the toxic links may be harming your rankings (even if you don't have a manual penalty) and so you might not see the effect of the good links straight away. But once the bad links are sorted, then you will.

You could do the disavows yourself as long as you're confident as to what makes a good / bad link.  When we're cleaning links up, we:

• Check to see if the linking domain is listed in Google – if not, we disavow;
• Check what the website actually is – if it is low quality, a spam directory, adult-themed, sites with viruses, gambling, etc, we disavow (this is to protect your brand as well as to clean up your link profile);
• Check and see if there are a huge number of links from a single website – in some cases we disavow; and finally,
• We check to ensure the link is within Google’s webmaster guidelines – for example, genuine recommendations in forums, genuine blog comment links that are on a relevant article, or genuine reviews are fine.
• We also look at links for c-blocks before the process begins and then check after disavow to see if they are varied or if anything’s been missed.

Hope that helps.

Jen

Hello!

I'm assuming those blog links are sitewide links like in the header/footer/sidebar?

In which case the question is really, is it a natural link? It's not the fact that it's a sitewide link that's really the problem. You'd expect sitewide links in some situations, for example with group company websites that link back to the main group website and this is natural behaviour.  It's more where you get links that just have no reason to be there, Like, 'Blogroll:' and then 5 random unrelated sites linked by their anchor text.  If on the other hand you've earned a couple of links in a list of good related resources in the sidebar, these are unlikely to cause you any problems.

If they don't 'feel natural', I would definitely ask if they can be made no-follow or better still, ask if they could each just give you one nice in-content link

ED: apologies for repeating some of the above answers, I think we all posted at the same time!

Hi Suchde!

1. You should first contact the owner of the website that is linking to you, and ask that they remove the links.  If they refuse or don't respond promptly, go ahead and disavow the links. If the links are coming from a single site, you can disavow the whole lot in one go using domain: thewebsite.com in your disavow file.

2. Google penalises by domain and not IP, and so in theory (if you believe Matt Cutts), the fact that you're sharing the hosting with a spammy site shouldn't effect your rankings.  However, there's an additional factor here - the spammy site is linking to you, making it look like there is some association.  Although you're going to disavow those links and hopefully this should get rid of the issue, I can't be certain how Google will treat this. You could perhaps purchase a dedicated IP address for your site to mitigate the risk.

3. No need to submit a reconsideration request if you haven't received a manual penalty - reconsideration requests are just for sites with a manual penalty.

Hope that helps!

Hi Fammy!

One thing you could do is to look at the dates the Panda updates hit (http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change) against your website traffic for those dates.  If you see a dip, you probably got hit.

If not, it's still possible that the duplicate content is holding back your visibility in the SERPs. You can sometimes guess this when you're adding new content and it doesn't really perform as you'd expect it to - but unfortunately, you won't know for sure until you take some action.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you risk getting hit in the future - for example, by a manual penalty - which could even result in the sites being removed.

263,114 is a huge number of duplicate articles and I was just wondering what proportion that is to your overall number of site pages.  If it is quite a high percentage, the risk is obviously greater.

I'd recommend you take some action personally.  Is there any pattern in the way the archive of articles is structured, to make it possible to write a catch-all 301 rule in your htaccess file that redirects them all to one of the three sites?

For example say your archived articles site in a folder called archive - you'd put this in the htaccess on sites 1 and 2:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase

RewriteRule ^archive/(.*)$ http://www.yoursite3.com/archive/$1 [R=301,L]

... and this would redirect anything in the archive directory to the archive directory on site 3, assuming the file names are exactly the same.

Alternatively if that's not an option, you could look at which of the articles have decent links going to them on sites 1 and 2, redirect those to chosen site 3 and remove the rest, cutting the workload down a little.

Google may well see an association between your site and Cornwall because of the image (and other factors, the mentions you make of Cornwall on your site for example) but that's a good thing, as it's an area that you cover/target. Your site is first and foremost about you being a magician so I don't think you have anything negative to worry about with the map - if Google has made an association with your site and Cornwall, it should help you rank better in the local Cornwall search results.

I would go for option 2 if you're targetting local search, i.e. include the three areas you're targetting. Check out Moz's Local Search Ranking Factors: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors (I think it'd look neater to write Newcastle, Sunderland & Durham than have the separators, personally)

The first option - having garden design twice in the page title - is a little spammy.

From a user perspective, you might want to  consider having two pages - one for small garden design and one for garden design (i.e. covering regular/larger spaces), if you can show different examples and different considerations for the different space available.  I can see that people search for 'small garden design' specifically, as well as just 'garden design' - and you could fit 'small' into the title with the place names (it'd still be under 60 characters) but if that's your only page, it might put off people who have a larger garden and are interested in your services.

I agree with Anthony, it's not a problem - the user would just copy and paste the URL in.

I think this can cause an issue on Windows servers since they would return the same page for Double-Beds-Luxury and double-beds-luxury (like Amazon does). Since Google interprets characters literally, accidentally linking to the wrong page can make it appear like you have dupe content - Google usually figures this out but it's thought it can dilute your link juice to that page. But you've mentioned that the page 404s if you lower the case which is good, I guess the site's on a linux server. I don't think here's nothing to worry about at all with leaving the caps as they are.

Hi Dan,

Apologies, I'm not totally sure if I have understood your question.  I am assuming you mean that the seller is copying the original product description which will also feature somewhere else on the web already, perhaps on the manufacturer's website, and they don't want to change it because that is the official description.  If I have that right then my best guess would be that the answer would be the same as for Google's guidance on affiliate sites.

i.e. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76465

Pages are not going to rank if all they offer is the same description that can be found elsewhere on the web.  However, the pages could still rank if, in addition to the copied description, they offer sufficient additional unique value such as original product reviews, ratings, and product comparisons. So your clients could copy in the original description but then add more words, comparisons, reviews and so on, to ensure the page is of value.

I hope that helps, but sorry if I have misunderstood what you are asking!

Hi Matthew!

Link building in today's SEO world is about relevancy, trust and authority.

The guest posting option is fine (asking blogs if you can write something for them), as long as what you're writing is an original and quality piece of content, and you're reaching out to trustworthy blogs that are, ideally, closely topically relevant to your own site for a link. In a perfect world all your links would be from relevant domains. However, links from irrelevant domains aren't bad - they still pass trust and authority, and having irrelevant links is part of a natural, diverse linking pattern. But if all or the vast majority of your links are from topically irrelevant domains, that becomes a problem.

I use Blogger Link Up and My Blog Guest to find prospective blogs to approach, but do your research, make sure you are reaching out to quality sites. Consider creating other content besides articles as well that stand a good chance of getting shared. Videos and ebooks for example.

Although having a peek at competitors' link profiles might give you some good ideas, don't just copy everything. Again, you want only quality links - links from relevant trusted websites to your own. So don't try and copy anything that doesn't meet this criteria.

You want your links to resemble a natural link building pattern and that gives you the biggest clue as to what is acceptable nowadays - so from a variety of sources, using a variety of linking/anchor text including the URL itself as you'd expect if they were just creating from people sharing your content around, and in a natural context (e.g. part of a review, or a resource link in a genuinely useful comment on a relevant article). Be very careful about deliberately creating links with your exact keywords in the anchor text. For example, if you were targeting the keyword 'car wax' you'd be better off linking to your site with natural variations such as 'here's a great article on car wax' 'here's how to apply car wax' 'the pros and cons of using car wax'. I think anchor text carries a lot less importance nowadays and Google will take more of a signal from the content on the linking page and linking site (but on the other hand, if you create lots of exact-match anchor text links to your site, Google does then pay attention as you risk a penalty). So yes, get natural-looking links from authority websites in your niche and you should see an improvement in your rankings for your target keywords.  Link building aside, focus on creating great content first and foremost, because in time that'll earn you natural links anyway.

Your second question - if people start talking about your article and sharing it, yes they will just share a link and that's what you want. You don't want them to share the actual content of the article. There would be loads of duplicate copies of your article all over the web then, and that's not good for SEO! (sorry if I have misunderstood this part). Getting all those social shares is good though, it's sending a signal to Google that your site has something worth sharing, that perhaps it's an authority on your subject.

Hope that helps a bit!