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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.

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.

Hey Moz Community!

I've got a website that has hundreds of thousands of old links that don't really offer any great content. They need to be removed. Would it be a better idea to remove them in batches of 5000,10000, or more over a long time... or remove them all at the same time because it doesn't matter?

Cheers,

Alex

There shouldn't be any 301 links in a sitemap. A sitemap should only contain links to active pages. So in your case, you should remove all the 301 links and replace them with the new links.

Couple notes - Having 301 links in your sitemap won't hurt your site or SEO unless the sitemap is so huge that you need to split it up into multiple files. But you should really only have the final links in the sitemap, neither people nor bots want to be redirected around. If you properly 301'd the crawlers will automatically update their links.

Changing links around in the sitemap generally won't hurt your site. Especially if the links no longer exist and you're improving the list. There are very few cases where making changes will hurt the site.

Thanks for the info Marie.

hey guys, got mini discussion question. With rapgenius.com getting penalized today, it raises some questions about linking. What they did is definitely not ok. A link scheme involving their own affiliate network is against Google guidelines for sure.

So is it ok to ask for a non reciprocal link if there is no incentive involved and no money changes hands?

ie. Someone writes an article related to your article topic, or they reference you without a link. Then uou email the webmaster requesting a link... They add it. Is this against the guidelines?

turned it on for ya.. send it over and I'll take a look

Can I see the link to look at the code?

Also make sure the image on your G+ account is a headshot and follows the authorship requirements.

Everything Jeff has there is the best way to combine the domains. You definitely don't want to mask and end up with duplicate content across .info, .org, .net, etc... Just send them to .com and use canonical tags

It's more work but the most beneficial way to take advantage of all this content would be to create a generic page with summaries of the services like a category for services, then create individual pages for each server detailing information on it. Possibly even cost or more info. From there make sure the individual page leads you back to overall services, and link to other related services from that page so the user can navigate easily.

Making it easy for the user to navigate will also make it easy for the crawler to navigate.

Can we see a link to check the code?

A number of people have been having issues with Google Authorship lately. I believe there was an announcement recently that Google made changes to their authorship algorithm to try and focus on more "trusted" writers.

Also try the snippet test, if it works there, then authorship is working and it's up to Google to display it:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Also make sure all your page titles are unique. While descriptions don't matter that much, titles should be unique or at the very least descriptive and targeted for your keywords.

Sounds like you have a good handle on it. As Mike recommends, focusing on the more category-style pages is definitely more appealing to a user looking to browse the site. At the end of the day, beyond SEO, the end-user is really what you care about. Another suggestion might be to make the single card pages more like category pages. Show cards from the same category, suggest similar cards or categories. Related links are one of the best ways to promote pageviews and get both the end-user as well as a googlebot interested in "crawling" more pages. That's a bonus on all fronts.

Meta descriptions won't get you penalized for duplicate content so there's no need to worry about that. The descriptions are really just what you see in the Google Search. Users are more likely to click a link that has a nice descriptive description that leads them into the content you're looking for. Of course a custom description is always best for each individual page/product, but in some cases the time isn't worth it.

I'm not sure what you mean with clear links on B, but A is a perfectly fine solution if there are just too many pages. A good options might be to create a generic description that uses the product name as a variable. ie: "My (Car) is red", "My (Cart) is red", etc.

Yeah it's generally a DNS setup. If you're hosting with a company the best thing to do is open a ticket and get them to walk through it with you. Most providers will have their own admin panels.

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.

There's no penalty for running a website on the subdomain. That's perfectly fine but all the redirecting might be confusing for regular users. The most important part for any website is to make it simple for the end-user. If it's simple for the user, Google won't have a problem with what you're doing. You'll also want to take a look at any backlinks. In terms of SEO, Google will pass a tiny bit of juice but for the most part, they treat a subdomain as a completely different site from the root domain. www.xyz.com is not the same site as subdomain.xyz.com, and both domains will need to be individually handled. They can work together but your backlinks will be split between the 2.

Since you lost those backlinks, you probably won't be able to bounce back to exactly where the site left off before those penalties. Did you get a manual action or was it done by the crawlers? Also, did you get a partial or full site penalty?

First double check your Google Webmaster Tools and see what the status of the penalty is and make sure that's removed. There's a Manual Actions area they added in the last few months which lets you see the stats and details of actions taken against your site by Google. If everything is resolved there, start improving your content and get back to link building. Since a good number of your old links are gone, they'll need to be replaced with better quality links.

A Google Update by the name of Hummingbird came out and has been moving it's way across sites. This one isn't meant to penalize like the Penguin and Panda updates but rather change how Google displays results. Double check all your keywords and see which ones declined in traffic. Then do a search and test to see where you rank and if you dropped from when you notice a decline in traffic.

For your questions:

1. If it's a straight link like this http://domain.com/page/?affiliate_id=123, yes that will pass juice

2. If you're using variables in the url string like this ?var=123, Google will ignore the ?var=123 and treat the link as a URL without the variables. You can apply special tags that let Google know that the variables are important if they are necessary.

3. No adding an affiliate ID or variable to a link won't reduce it's value as long as you don't rewrite the link and use some sort of fancy redirect. Many affiliate program software use a link schema to track links that they generate.

If you're an affiliate program and you have links pointing to your site, the links shouldn't pass any SEO juice. Google can treat that as a way of purchasing links and penalize your site for buying links. What you can do is setup a sort of redirect for links by using affiliate program software to handle tracking or using a subdomain redirect that stops the juice from flowing from the website promoting your products.

It's hard to diagnose the problem without seeing it. Does the Fetch As Google results show any errors or report anything but "Success"?

The report just shows you what Google is seeing so look for anything missing from the page. Usually if it can fetch, then Google can see your site. Double check there isn't a noindex added into the meta somewhere.

Would you be able to post the domain for us to look at?

If the site has been "down" or unaccessible by Google, it's natural for them to deindex the site. There's a grace period for server issues but a couple months will definitely get your pages removed. That doesn't mean every single page is deindexed, but some definitely will. Bring the site and servers back to good standing and the pages will flow back into Google's results.

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.

Old post but for anyone that feels that waiting for Google to penalize someone will take too long or not work... here's an example of a major competitor of ours getting hit on the last:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/therichest.org

It took about a year and a bit. We even offered $XX,XXX to purchase their sites, and after discovering their techniques, just waited it out to see their huge decline.

When it comes to link building, take what you can get. Whatever people deem link worthy, focus on that. Start with Category pages and see if websites pick those up. In my experience, content pages are easier to link build for and create great deep links. If you page breadcrumbs or some sort of navigation passing the user back to your homepage and category pages, those content pages will pass pagerank so it really doesn't matter what pages you build links for, just build links.

Remember, stay white hat if you want you site to stick around. Google will eventually detect black hat links - forum/comment spam, forum signatures, links in social media profiles. You want good links from reputable sites.

There's nothing to worry about. All Google is saying is that the image no longer exists and it's returning a 404 for that specific link "http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg". When Google tries to fetch the broken URL, it's getting redirected to the 404 and it's saying that it's ok. We detect a 404 page and that fetches ok. However, the actual URL it was trying (the broken image) is not there. Google will automatically remove the 404s over time and there will be no negative impacts from this.

An article we wrote a while ago with a few examples. It's my site but answers your question:

http://buildforsearch.com/googles-worst-penalties-and-what-happened/

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.

Short answer: No

These will affect SEO:

New servers are slow and affect site speed
IPs flagged as spam/bad IPs
The new IPs are in another country

1. I would first try and see why the users came to the site in the first place.

Where are your users coming from?
Are they looking for products or information?
Are they actually interested in buying anything?
Can they find your products elsewhere on a more reliable site?

2. Fix any broken images and work on building trust:
http://www.vrtack.com/crusader-fly-mask-standard-p-1212.html

• First link I clicked into had a broken image
  Build trust by including things like your shop address. Clean up the logo and make it a clean crisp image. Encourage your existing customer base to interact with the site, then build on to the site to improve ways for customers to interact. Customer reviews, testimonials, or just an image of your shop location so they feel like they're buying it from the real world.

The Internet is a competitive area where many retailers can sell the same products and services as other retailers. The only way to succeed over the long term is to make your product and website more targeted for a specific niche (making you the authority on the subject), or offer something unique that your competitors don't. People can shop anywhere. The main question will be why would someone want to buy something off your site and not someone elses?

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.

you can use a sitemap validator to check:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php?op=validate-xml-sitemap&go=1&sitemapurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.local-sex-search.com%2Fsitemap.xml&submit=Validate

Or just submit into webmaster tools and see if it bounces back any errors.

That's definitely frustrating. I've been in the same boat a number of times and had decent success with a few tactics. Before you start looking at Negative SEO techniques or responding with underhanded tactics, first look at your brand.

Do you feel your brand is stronger and more solid than the copying brand?
Do you have something that's unique that they are unable to copy?

If the answer is yes to both of those questions, then first focus on improving your service and look to make your brand stand out a bit more from the copy. As your brand grows stronger, their brand will get pushed back naturally. Start pushing on social media and engaging your followers to post, comment, and share your posts. This engagement will boost your SEO and the positive comments from your audience will start to show that you offer a better product.

That's the long term solution. In the short term, look and see what they're copying. If they're copying your posts word for word, then you can report that to Google. Google has a Report Copyright page for this:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&

Google gets to these in time and will eventually drop their pages. You can also DMCA their hosting company if they're clearly copying your articles.

To combat any false negative articles they're writing about you, I would start leveraging social media. If you can get your clientele to start engaging your page, post good comments, and like posts, users who search for your brand will see that you offer a legitimate service. Follow up by writing press releases that link to your social media pages, articles, guest posts, and get the word out that you have fans who've left great feedback.

If you can successfully show that you're better without getting your hands dirty, your brand will be much stronger than the copy. They will eventually fall behind and be unable to keep up. The down side is it takes a bit more effort. However, I've taken the low road before and the problem is you end up just bickering at the same level. Neither company moves ahead because all they do is fight rather than improve their products.

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.

I like http://sproutsocial.com. They've been pretty good with support and they have a good setup for multiple managers.

You're getting off just putting your entire business into a single domain. Unless you have the time to test an experiment running 10 different domains it's better just to build one big quality website. With 10 domans you need to build backlinks to 10 different sites. It's hard enough building one up.

To rank geographically, I would continue optimizing the front page for straight "widgets", let Google pick up whatever they wanted, and develop backlinks to your sub widget pages.

Quick question. Are you using the same widget product in multiple locations. For instance:

widgets.com/houston/car-app-widget/widgets.com/dallas/car-app-widget/ (where this is the same widget)

Each directory should have unique widgets. Using the same content will get you in trouble (duplicate content).

You could inadvertently block /brand/ altogether. Just because you use a // doesn't mean Google follows the same rules when crawling.