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Thanks fellas.  Agreed.

Cyrus' webinar yesterday got me thinking about the use of bullet points and Google's increasing affection for context and semantics.

Because of their brevity, I can see bullet points parsing up context/semantics etc.

Some of our competitors (apparently trying to appeal to Google) are writing 2-4 sentences about the product in the desciption section followed by bullet points repeating the same information.  They'll also put a few sentences of description at the top of the page above the price and then repeat it below in the description (this is relatively common).

I put text in the description section and like bullet points as a shopper because I can quickly and easily see important information - therefore I use them heavily in product descriptions.

Is Google smart enough process bullet points and mash together context or would Google prefer content in well written sentences?

Should I be frying bigger fish?

Great stuff Thomas. Made some notes to self.

I'd put all the link building efforts into the main site and scrap the microsites.

As a customer, I don't like clicking on something and being redirected to another site.

As someone who links to stuff, I don't link to something that redirects people to something else.

Google not only knows your backlink profile and perhaps in your case, your motives.

Relatively speaking, your main site doesn't sell a bunch of different stuff.

Our site sells a bunch of different stuff.

I sense you're frustrated that page 1 for "plastic storage bins" is taken over by the biggies like Rubbermaid, Lowes, Walmart, Target, OfficeMax and lesser names with moz rank domain authorities over 50 when yours is at 27.

I think the microsite/doorway strategy was ill conceived.  The time would have been better spent on your main site creating new and improved content and perhaps an on-site blog linking to your products.

Why did you do this in the first place?

Wait a minute...I'm interested in this.

How did you ninjas find the website?  Must've been posted prior to the answers and removed later.

Luke, would you mind pm'ing me with the pages?  I think I could benefit from a look at it.

Is Penguin focused primarily on backlinks or does it also assess internal linking/anchor text?

We've lost about 3,000 visitors a month since the rolling updates were implemented. I'm always careful not to over-react to algo updates but enough time has passed that I think the dust has settled.

I try to stay white in all I do but I think if I've over-done anything its the internal linking related products/categories with exact match.

My backlink profile also has an over-abundance of affiliate links but that's kind of out of my hands isn't it?

Does the mark say, "EGOL?"

There may be some value in branding in that regard depending on what you're selling.

However, If its small and unobtrosive then the viewer probably wouldn't be able to tell what the logo is/says until they open the image.

Edit add - when its that small its easily removed and cropped so it really becomes a matter of whether you think its important as a branding element versus protection.

A watermark won't affect your rank.

In my opinion this is more a matter of the use of your time.

I very rarely see watermarks anymore on ecommerce sites. I think a watermark will do more to pollute the appearance of your product than protect your images from piracy.

From a practical perspective, Google and other shopping feeds may have rules regarding watermarks and artwork associated with products so make sure you are aware of the rules if you use feeds.

Edit add - I can recall 1 ecommerce site I've visited using watermarks and the only other places I see it are sites that sell images and artwork.

Hi Miriam,

I've experienced what you described from a user perspective and I think it depends on the service being provided.

For me, web and phone type services do not require a physical location and it does not bother me to get local results from an outfit that does not have a physical presence.

Services like floral and candy type stuff may make a difference and may not.  If I needed to stop somewhere on the way home and get some goodies for my wife, I obviously need a walk-in store and will get peeved while looking if I see a bunch of virtual stuff.

On the other hand, I needed to send my daughter some chocolate covered strawberries for Valentines day so I Googled an outfit near her home assuming they would get it there quickly. Well, they could do it but their prices were outrageous. I found an outfit based in California with a virtual page one organic listing in the same city that guaranteed next day service so I bought from them.

Finally, if I need a roofer, plumber or heat and air guy I want somebody with a physical location in or near my city. No virtual stuff.  I came across a virtual, type service of this kind that may or may not have had a physical franchise in my city but even if they did I would not use their service. I wouldn't trust them.  It smacks of fly-by-night.  But that's just me.

In sum:

1. Depends on the service. If I'm looking for a geo location with a local street address and can't find one - I don't like it and will skip it.  If I'm looking for flowers, candy, phone service etc. where an email or no physical or vocal service is needed I don't mind it at all.  For example, I was looking for a Mister Sparky in Dallas and I found a site with a map of the dallas area but no street address pinned or stated. Just a city and phone number. Yuck.

2. Thin or duplicate doesn't really matter for me. I went with a heat and air guy who's been doing business in my sub-urb for years. He had a very basic website on a yellow pages cms site. It was about what I expected for a smaller local guy. However, if I was looking in the big city like you suggest, I would expect a better presentation where quality of content would be more of an influence.

3. I wouldn't recommend a virtual company target a bunch of sub-urbs and small cities. I would target 2 or 3 of the major cities in each state and create impressive landing pages.

In local SEO practices, is it best to geotag all images or only specific ones?

For example, if we have images of our retail store on our G+ page (or on our About Us page) it seems like common sense to geotag those images.

However, if you're a local photographer do you want to geotag all of your images or only images shot in locations where you'd like to rank?

I like the question, your answer and I don't get this stuff.

If the definition of semantics is: "the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. There are a number of branches and subbranches of semantics, including formal semantics , which studies the logical aspects of meaning, such as sense, reference, implication, and logical form, lexical semantics , which studies word meanings and word relations, and conceptual semantics , which studies the cognitive structure of meaning."

Then, it sounds like I need to use exact plus different partial matches to ad perspective or relevancy to the main keyword.

Then again, I fall into the group of people who don't "get" this stuff.

Link to it from the homepage well above the fold.

I've asked the same thing in the past and told by authoritative users in this forum the following: "If your site is structurally sound, you shouldn't need a sitemap."

I've bought into that principle.

If customers scroll to the bottom of my pages without finding or keyword searching what they need, I've probably not done a good job of setting it up.

Put into practice, we're in the process of revamping to a top navigation with search suggest features and left nav filtering functionality.

Good article. Thanks for posting

I need to read some more on it.

I wondered how the refinement might influence the Title content.

I don't typically include "buy" in the title but I've got to look at our serps and re-think this.

I will definitely do that for Rackspace bots, Chris.

Thank you for taking the time to walk me through this and tweak my filter.

I'll give the site you posted a visit.

Crap.

Well, I guess the vernacular is what I need to know.

Knowing what to put where is the trick isn't it? Is there a dummies guide somewhere that spells this out in kindergarten speak?

I could really see myself botching this filtering business.

Does it need the . before the )

rackspace cloud servers

Maybe my problem is I'm not looking in the right place.

I'm in audience>technology>network and the column shows "service provider."

For example,

Since I implemented the filter four days ago, rackspace cloud servers have visited my site 848 times, , visited 1 page each time, spent 0 seconds on the page and bounced 100% of the time.

What is the reg expression for rackspace?

Sure. Here's the post for filtering the bots.

Here's the reg x posted:  ^(microsoft corp|inktomi corporation|yahoo! inc.|google inc.|stumbleupon inc.)$|gomez

We've submitted our sites to the reputable local directories and update only as needed.

Looking through our backlink profile I've found our store on ooodles of local directories I have nothing to do with and never signed up for.

I'd direct the money elsewhere.

Here's one I've got bookmarked:  http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

And another:  http://pointblankseo.com/creative-link-building

I've set up a filter to remove bot traffic from Analytics. I relied on regular expressions posted in an article that eliminates what appears to be most of them.

However, there are other bots I would like to filter but I'm having a hard time determining the regular expressions for them.

How do I determine what the regular expression is for additional bots so I can apply them to the filter?

I read an Analytics "how to" but its over my head and I'm hoping for some "dumbed down" guidance.

I'm curious if/how this will affect how many keywords to put in the title tag (for ecommerce - catetories and product names/titles).

If its related primarily to conversational search it sounds like something I won't be sweating.

You answered my question so it didn't seem dated to me.

Related to conversational search. Good to know.

Thanks David.

Two primary areas of focus for Hummingbird:

1. Better results for longer tail keyword inquiries

2. Voice command results

The public is becoming more seasoned at search as the years go by so they are comfortable adding more terms to their search.

IMO, social has also helped educate internet users for specificity:  @xyz or .com/xyz etc.  We're actually telling people what to enter after a hash-tag. Unthinkable a few years ago.

I'm curious if/how this will affect how many keywords to put in the title tag (for ecommerce - catetories and product names/titles).

Depending on how your site is set up I think some history of sold out events gives you credibility from a user perspective.

Having said that however, as a user I don't want to see sold out events past the last 6 months (if you've got quite a few) - 12 months at the most.

Anything past that I would delete and redirect to current events.

Exactly!

I wonder if Volusion called and asked if they could piggy-back?

If they had a partner page with Moz would the rel-canonical go to Rand?

Without assessing your site I can say you may not be doing anything wrong.

During Google's recent rolling algo changes we saw a drop in traffic of about 20% during the similar time frame you suggest.

We've recovered about 15% of that lost traffic and continue in the direction of the traffic levels prior to those changes.

We're white hat in what we do and this recent algo update is the only time we've actually lost significant traffic.

I usually don't over-react to Google's pendulum swings as things typically return to normal.

I'm not a business lawyer but has Moz been in the marketplace long enough to take issue with this?

Volusion's new mid-to-enterprise level eCommerce platform is http://www.mozu.com/

Thanks Robert.

"Assuming (from your question) you do not have a physical address for city B,"

The scenario has a business address in city B which is in the footer of the site.

If the business address is in the footer, how does it affect site optimization of big city A and he half dozen other cities in the sub-directories?

Will there be any affect on the kind of keyword data or volume of it published in the keyword planner?

Edit - Keyword planner when not using in AdWords. The free stuff.

Did I misread the article?

How will this affect Google's keyword planner data?

We appear to be picking up momentum in the direction of pay-to-play.

Yes, I want to know how the footer name, address and phone number affect local optimization efforts.

Suppose I want to optimize my site (as Robert suggests) for big city A. However, my business address is in a suburb of big city A (little city B).

If the little city address is in the footer, will it diminish my SEO efforts for big city A?

Further, if I'm optimizing for 2, 5 or 10 cities in sub-directories how does the NAP in the footer affect optimization for those cities?

Is the NAP stripped from the footer throughout the site?  Can you leave the NAP in the footer without negatively affecting on-page optimization for big city A and the other half dozen cities?

Hi Alicia,

I'm not sure of the content of that video, but since it is still branded as SEO Moz it apparently got lost in translation.

Perhaps one of the moderators will post.

As far as SEO is concerned, the best place for you to start is with the Moz Beginner's Guide.

Thanks Miriam.

Another thread suggested (and a couple reputable users said it works) to optimize the site for major city A and create a sub-directory for 2, 5 or 10 other city pages.  I get the approach but what do you do with the footer NAP?

I asked for clarity in the other thread but got no takers.

So I'll ask here. For this type of optimization to work, would you have to strip the NAP from the footer for big city A site optimization AND the sub-directory individual city optimization?

Or can you leave the NAP on all the pages (sub-directory pages included) and just have strong page optimization above the footer throughout?

I'm not knowledgeable in root/sub-directory setups so I may not be asking sensible questions.

Big city A is the target optimization for services.

Suburb city B is the location of the business.

Will the NAP of the business in the footer negatively impact on-page optimization for Big city A?

The site is built around the major city (that can be the largest or the one that is most important to the client, etc.).

Got it.  But If my single biz is located in a suburb of the main city, will my biz address in the footer of a WP site diminish my ability to rank for the main city for which the rest of the page is optimized?

For every other city we use subdirectories. Assuming one service in general, we will have two pages for each "subdirectory city": typically one that explains the business with content containing info re that city....Then we have a contact page with same and with Google maps API.

I'm not very knowledgeable about sub-directories since I've not needed to use them (yet).

Since the page is in a sub-directory, is the footer info removed?  Sounds like it is in lieu of the contact us page.

I really like the pixel ruler displayed in the article.

Do any of these tools feature such a "skin" that you can turn on and off?

Just got my newlsetter from LinkedIn with a link to an interesting article about the part of a webpage that gets the most viewership.

Are there any page tools out there that will tell me the pixel measurements on a page as shown in the article?

Uh?

**Anybody who is lazy enough to harvest that info is lazier than smart.  Not a threat.   And, I believe in the theory that imitators come in second. **

Bravo.  A competitor is gonna look at those 5-20 meta keywords and do what?

Bob, that link is producing a 404.

We've got a few backlinks from Keyword Spy and Keyword Spy Pro.

I'm pretty sure of the answer but I'll ask it anyway.

Is there any way to determine who's doing the snooping?

Are there any signals to look for while clicking back through the link "crumbs" that might tell me something of interest or value?

And the legend grows.......

Sorry to burst your bubble Bob, but EGOL is a hobbit.

He drums up his ideas for best of the web content while riding his unicorn across the shire.

A sighting of this hobbit is more rare than reports of run-ins with a sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster and ET in area 51.

It doesn't help that his avatar is actually a photoshopped headshot of George Will.

To make matters worse, the only footprints he leaves are pages of kickass content across the web.