Hey guys,

I'm working with a new company that doesn't have a brick and mortar storefront, they deliver.

They basically deliver pre packaged smoothies in a VERY localized area (Vancouver, BC). I'm wondering how grandiose their goals should be re ranking for keywords that have non localized authority.

What do I mean?

Lets say their marketing pillars are "health education related to smoothies" "convenient veggies for smoothies" "(insert health benefit here) for smoothies". Should they be trying to compete for these keywords? Or should they really be trying to rank with keywords especially to Vancouver?

Side note: What kind of effect does Country and Locality have on keywords that are generally used by content providers and not service related companies building out an inbound strategy?

Thanks in advance!

Great -- very thoughtful answer.

I've been using restaurant, organization, and LocalBusiness schema. I'm thinking it's prudent to focus on event based schema for most of the restaurants needs.

I've noticed with a few of the restaurant clients I work with that Schema isn't contributing at all to their SERP -- their Google + page is.

Is there any way to have more control over what Google is pulling to help make UX better? I.e. showing photos of the restaurant without a logo, etc.

Hey folks,

Curious has to the how and why there are links at the bottom of this search query for "Justin Bieber Networth" for other celebrities, completely unrelated i.e. "harry styles, taylor swift" etc.

http://imgur.com/DNXuyRW   (also attached)

Is this an SEO tool? How did they embed this into a search query? Thanks!

Screen Shot 2015-06-08 at 12.04.43 PM

DNXuyRW

Yup definitely. Whether you're completely removed or simply dropped doesn't matter. If you're not there anymore, for some reason Google determined you're no longer an authority for that keyword. So you need to find out why. Since you just redesigned, the way way is to back track, double check all the old tags and compare them to the new site, check the text and keyword usage on the website, look for anything that's changed that could contribute to the drop. If you don't find anything, tools like majesticSEO are handy to checking if your backlinks are still healthy.

Logo definitely needs to be made clickable to Home.

Did you compare the old design and the new design's text to make sure you're still covering the same keywords. In many cases a redesign is more "streamlined" which also means less text or a re-write which is going to impact the keywords your site is relevant for.

You generally want canonicals on every page but Google has been paying a little less attention to them lately. They seem to be moving in the multi language direction so canonicals may be switched over to that one day.

Anyway you use them to let Google and most crawlers know which page to index. So if you have a bunch of URLs with different variables, they know to only index the root page.

ie:
http://website.com/page/?var=1
http://website.com/page/?var=2
http://website.com/page/?var=3

Set the canonical to http://website.com/page/, and that'll help let them know to only index http://website.com/page/ - also helps prevent duplicate content issues.

Yup as Thomas says above adding any tags to the end of a full static URL will have no effect on the clean URL structure as long as you set your canonicals correctly.

If the URL is http://website.com/page/?CID=1234, the canonical should be http://website.com/page/

It's best to choose either www or non-www and stick with that single URL. When people link to you, you don't want some links going to www and others to non-www. Just use one and 301 redirect the other URL into the one you're going to use.

Also make the use of canonical tags. Ryan there sent over some links for that. It's best to set that up on all your pages as well.

As mentioned above just setting the title to the most popular keyword won't guarantee you rank for that keyword. You're better off creating a page that uses and supports both keywords, or target a good keyword for your brand. Follow up by creating sub pages or sub content that support the 2 keywords you've mentioned. The goal isn't to just use the keyword in a few places, it's to create a whole map of content that supports a single keyword.

Anything with "Windows 7 activation code" will eventually get hit by Google whether you decide to report it or not. It might take a day, week, month, year but Google will eventually find their links spammy and do something about it. That's really the gamble with black hat. How long will it take Google or someone to kill the project? The idea with blackhat though, is you burn the domain or burn whatever the project is once it's no longer profitable. If you plan on working on the same brand for a long time, whitehat is really the only way to go.

They'll see a short boost now, but once they get hit, it'll be a huge hassle to fix everything.

Yeah Analytics will contain all their top keyword and you can check their placements with the SEOmoz rank tracker or just searching those keywords in Google yourself. Make sure to pay attention the current websites

,

to X, and meta tags. When doing the new site, use the same tags.

I also recommend getting a second opinion. Look up someone you work with regularly or even post to SEOmoz and get someone to take a second look. It's normal to miss something so a second set of eyes is handy.

This is a tough situation and one I've seen many many times. Basically your boss wiped out all of his backlinks. Depending on how long everything has been down, he might have a chance of recovering them by reverting everything back to the way it was. Generally, it's best to leave a domain as is and work on building the new brand alongside the old pages. Redirect relevant pages from the old site to the new site, and put up a banner or countdown from the old site's index to the new one. The new domain is PR0 and new so it has to get built up. The fastest way to do that is to leverage the old domain to boost the new one, then make the full redirect once the new one has picked up some steam.

Just like the 2 suggestions, it's really best to keep both sites. Move forward with the new site and re-brand your company but don't scrap the original website. Add a banner, write up, some news explaining the re-brand and point the original site to the new site. You'll create a backlink and if the person is genuinely interested in what you have to offer, they'll follow to the new website.

301 any page that are relevant from the original site to the new site. If both sites have a products page then you can point it over. Google will naturally figure out what you did and start passing any relevant benefits to the new site.

Sounds like something built in early 2000s. Tables won't hurt your SEO directly but it will have a negative impact on pagespeed/load and content optimization. Tables use a lot of extra code that makes it sluggish. I generally always recommend a re-program into DIV/CSS. It's faster, optimized, you will see an SEO benefit.

If your client really doesn't want to do the recode, what I would do is setup all the tags, clean the menu, add any rich snippets that apply, then let them know that's the farthest they'll be able to go without upgrading into DIV/CSS.

Yup Google offers to help websites all the time. They've been known to reach out for everything from getting a publisher to help with beta test widgets or adsense to something more custom like this. I suggest you give them a try and see if it works for you.

If the new website is related to the old website, redirect as many individual pages to the new site as possible. Match up the pages and that'll create the most seamless way of moving the site from the old to new. All your old traffic will end up in the right place on the new site. Benefits there include any SEO or inbound links will pass pagerank over to the new site as well giving you a bit of a boost.

If the old site has nothing to do with the new site but it's your new brand, company, or project that you want to draw attention do, just do a straight 301 redirect and explain that it's a new project somewhere on the page. Any existing traffic from the old site will follow through and learn what you're currently up to on the new site.

If the old domain has no traffic, no SEO, no inbound links, and really doesn't have anything to offer, keep it parked.

There might be a link or something directing the crawlers to your site's IP address instead of the original domain. There is potential for getting flagged with duplicate content but I feel it's fairly unlikely. You do want to fix this though, it would hamper your backlink efforts. These steps will correct this issue.

1. Setup canonical tags on all your pages. This lets Google know that 1 url should be linked for this page whether they're on the IP or domain.

2. Set your host up so that anything that directs to the IP is automatically redirected to the domain. This can be done with your hosting company, or through .htaccess, or through PHP. I suggest you do it with the hosting company.

3. Check through your site and make sure no links point to the IP domain. If there are no links pointing to the IP, the crawler shouldn't follow.

It's really best not to change your URL structure around. If you really need to, then definitely make sure you have 301 directs all pointed from the old links to the new ones.

The permalink keywords in the middle don't really apply as much weight as they used to. Using /home-rentals/ and /rentals/ won't immediately relate the pages to those keywords anymore. So with that, set your structure based on the different sections of your site so they don't conflict rather than inserting keywords. So example: "domain.com/search/california/" doesn't conflict with "domain.com/category/california/"

I need to see your pages to give you a better response on the last question. With permalinks, it's always good to match your page title with the page's main keyword. So if the title is 123 Street Ave then the link should be /slug/123-street-ave/. The slug is whatever descriptive keyword for that type of post is. It would be /search/, /category/, or no slug at all.

That doesn't answer your question for the SEO decline though. Chances are you've been affected by the recent Penguin 2.0 update. I'd start by checking my links and seeing if any of those sites got hit. Also check your webmaster tools and see if any notices have popped up.

From clicking around I feel like the site needs to put a bit more effort into building trust. Here's a good article with some suggestions and ideas that you can build off (not my website)

http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/

Something they don't include in here is an "About Us". There are so many websites out there offering the same product at similar prices now. I generally go to the website with the most grounded message.

Another idea would be to try and make the website feel more local. Local SEO and marketing is big right now, and people like thinking they're buying locally.