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Having a single brand at all your locations will definitely help people recognise you and avoid conusion - especially if you use your brand without any variations on signage at your location.

With the branch number, I'd say do what is right for the customer. Does the customer care about the branch number, for example because it's on their collection notiification? If not, drop it as it's not useful to them and may even lead to confusion. If they do, keep it.

With the city name I'd say the same thing. If yor store signage calls your branch "Widgets R Us London" then having the listing name and the store name match exactly will reassure people they've found the right place. If your signage and other collateral says "Widgets R Us" then drop it. Even if there are multiple locations in one town their addresses are displayed in the search results so there should be no confusion. Have a look at how supermarkets in major cities do it (I'm in the UK so I've just checked Sainsbury in London while writing this) and you'll see that even when they have several branches close together they don't put their locations in the name as the address and the location of the pin on the map is enough to guide people.

Some people wonder about the beneits of including the city name as it might help them appear higher in the local results. From what I've seen including the location in your listing name has very little impact. Your location relative to the point being searched for and the reviews you've received are much more powerful factors. So moving toward a completely coherent brand shouldn't have any negagtive impact on your branding.

Hi Eric,

As I say I'm familiar with the general principles of redirects, having applied them before with other clients. Unfortunately it's the industry-specific knowledge I need.

Link resolvers are regularly used in academic publishing to point from, for example, library holdings pages to an ebook or a publisher's platform, at which point temporary redirects make sense for various reasons. My concern is that in using them to point from our old site to our new site will cause us problems.

I have recently started working at an academic publisher on their digital products. In this industry it's standard practice to use link resolvers - such as SFX from ExLibris - when updating a product as an easy way to manage URL migration. However, these link resolvers appear to use 302 redirects which makes me concerned about the potential for rankings to drop.

Does anybody out there know about the use of link resolvers and their effects on search engine visibility?

The main sources of information I've been able to find so far have been a Google Webmaster Central forum post and a piece on DOI news from 2005. Any information that's more up to date would be very useful, thanks!

Background: A company I am working with recently consolidated content from several existing domains into one new domain. Each of the old domains focused on a vertical and each had a number of product pages and a number of blog pages; these are now in directories on the new domain. For example, what was www.verticaldomainone.com/products/productname is now www.newdomain.com/verticalone/products/product name and the blog posts have moved from www.verticaldomaintwo.com/blog/blogpost to www.newdomain.com/verticaltwo/blog/blogpost. Many of those pages used to rank in the SERPs but they now do not.

Investigation so far: Looking at Search Console's crawl stats most of the product pages and blog posts do not appear to be being indexed. This is confirmed by using the site: search modifier, which only returns a couple of products and a couple of blog posts in each vertical. Those pages are not the same as the pages with backlinks pointing directly at them.

I've investigated the obvious points without success so far:

• There are a couple of issues with 301s that I am working with them to rectify but I have checked all pages on the old site and most redirects are in place and working
• There is currently no HTML or XML sitemap for the new site (this will be put in place soon) but I don't think this is an issue since a few products are being indexed and appearing in SERPs
• Search Console is returning no crawl errors, manual penalties, or anything else adverse
• Every product page is linked to from the /course page for the relevant vertical through a followed link.
• None of the pages have a noindex tag on them and the robots.txt allows all crawlers to access all pages

One thing to note is that the site is build using react.js, so all content is within app.js. However this does not appear to affect pages higher up the navigation trees like the /vertical/products pages or the home page.

So the question is:

"Why might product and blog pages not be indexed on the new domain when they were previously and what can I do about it?"

You're likely to see problems resulting from a few different factors:

• Search engines go through a limited number of pages on your site, known as a crawl budget. Around a third of that budget will go cataloguing duplicate products, which is a waste since those pages will be discarded since...
• If a search engine sees two pages with the same content only one will rank. This means there is no point from an SEO perspective to having those 4,000 extra pages, since nobody will land on them
• Because you're providing content that sin't high quality the rest of the site may well get hit by Panda, bringing the rest of your rankings down
• Customers will see the two identical products, spend a bit of time trying to figure out the difference between them, get frustrated, then buy from somebody else

If you're looking at convincing your boss not to do this then here's the important bit: add those products and you risk getting fewer people to your site and fewer of those people turning into customers.

First off you definitely want to get rid of that redirect chain, the 301-302-200. That 302 temporary redirect isn't a good thing. Go back to your IT company them and ask them to do things properly by redirecting straight to the .co.uk site. That 302 is intriguing; I presume you've checked that they've used 301s to redirect the .com to the .co.uk domain, not 302s? If they have done it with 302s, first get them to turn those 302s into 301s then get a new IT company.

If the microsites are for different product categories then make the 301s point to your category pages; any user who goes through that 301 is going to prefer landing on the relevant category page to the home page.

Also, if you can do so and depending on the site you might want to look at changing the .com domain's DNS records, so that the changeover happens at the server level not just at the browser level.

A few ideas for improving the domain authority of the .co.uk quickly:

• Lok again in OSE at the links pointing to the .com and if any of those aren't from your own microsites then see if you can get them changed - most people are quite happy to do that if you ask them since it helps their customers find what they need
• Do the same with all your microsites
• Go through the full list of your suppliers, see which of them link to retailers, plant hires, or distributors but don't link to you, and ask for a link
• You have local branches, so get into the local directories
• If you exhibit at any trade shows, get any coverage in the trade press, or do anything else with someone that has a website, ask for a link
• Do you have customers with websites who have been customers for a long time, as in ten years or more? If so would any of them be happy putting a badge on their website? Wrap a link around that badge and there you go

Are the backlinks from external pages, rather than internal? If you can get an external backlink or two pointing at the page that may help indexation speed. The easiest - but least reliable for ensuring indexation - way would be to mention the new page on social media from a few accounts including Google +.

If that content could be made to rank for terms that could bring in new visitors then definitely - it would be a wasted opportunity otherwise. This is especially true for evergreen content that will be useful to potential customers or clients for years to come.

I'd agree with all of the above and say that directories are essentially useless for improving rankings, except when they count towards local citations.

Having said that, I would suggest getting a listing in any directories that rank for search queries you want to appear for. That way even if you don't get clicks directly through from your website being in the SERP you might catch a few customers coming through the directory that you otherwise wouldn't have.

i wouldn't think it would be an SEO problem to have a different header on your subpages to your homepage. There are some companies who have done this to good effect. Dropbox is a good example; they have no navigation on their homepage but do on other pages. There are also plenty of people who change their headers on landing pages and during the checkout, to remove the distraction of a menu.

However there may well be development problems, depending on what platform you're using. And from the users point of view, what is the benefit of having different navigation in different places on the site? Or are they likely to get confused?

Hi Bob,

Taking an existing resource and improving on it is a good way to create linkable content. If you can add or update any of the statistics they use - say if the original are three or four years old - then that's even better.

I would definitely include references, as links, for all your statistics: not only will this make the organisation you are quoting happy but it can be useful for readers who want to find out more on a particular study. It also gives you an opportunity to send the sources you have used a quick email mentioning this new resource. That can be a good way to start getting links and social media mentions.

If this truly is going to be the newest and best resource in your niche then finding a few influencers, bloggers, and journalists who might be interested in it won't hurt things. Do a bit of PR by reaching out to them and convincing them of why your resource is going to be so useful for your customers and their readers.

Are you able to access and edit your .HTACCESS file? It should be in the root directory of your domain. If so you should be able to create 301 redirects pointing one URL permanently to another. If not things may be more difficult.

P.S. Are you guys really based in Jersey? It's rather rare to meet a fellow Channel Islander here!

This was a question that was recently raised by somebody else here on the Q&A and you can see the full discussion here. Although the question is slightly different, the answer is the same: it depends which HTML version you are using. If it's HTML4 or XHTML, only use one h1 per page, but if you are using HTML5 you can have one per section. So you could have one in your

<nav>, on in your, one in each of the

<aside>s on your page and one in your

<footer>.

The reason for this is that for HTML4 search engines look at headings to give the page hierachy - remember they only had

s to separate content areas - but HTML5 uses the new semantic elements like

<header>and <fotter>to work out hierarchy, with headings only affecting hierachy within one of those tags.</fotter></header>

</footer>

</aside>

</nav>

Is one domain with four directories an option? If so, that's what I'd probably go for (as long as the four products don't compete with each other directly). The reason for this is that I imagine you have a finite resource pool: using those resources on one website rather than four websites or subdomains (remember that search engines treat different subdomains in much the same way as different root domains - as separate entities) will be the most efficient way to use them, giving you the best chance of success.

Is there a strategic reason for not giving one site your full attention? I ask because surely a half-arsed effort on four sites is going to take twice as much work as a fully-arsed effort on one site.

P.S. Be careful with statements like the one in your question. This is a community that is rather passionate about dedicating time, effort, and intelligence to SEO and so you may be opening yourself up to some flak. It might be couched in nice terms and have actual helpful advice in the same paragraph, but that's because they're also nice people.

The answer to this questions kind of depends on the technology you are using.

(X)HTML 4 and below will only allow you to use one h1 per page - so it's got to be the most important thing on that page. Think of it like the headline on the front of a newspaper. Your H2 elements are then the sub-heads, h3's sub-subheads and so on; like the newspaper you can have as many of those breaking up the text as you want. This is why you may have heard about people using an h2 element for their main headline, especially on home pages; the most "important" thing there - to the client at least - is the logo, which is therefore often wrapped in an h1.

HTML5, on the other hand, lets you have multiple h1 elements (one per section). So you can wrap your logo - up in the header - in one, you can have one for your page's main headline - it's in a

or-  and your sidebar can have one - it's in its own <sidebar>after all. You can even have one in your footer if the whim takes you. Search engines establish which h1 is more important through a hierarchy (article is more important than sidebar is more important than header or footer).

Hope that helps!</sidebar>

The number of suggestions from EGOL and a look through a headline-writing post like this or this or this will quickly show that there are a whole vast array of different ways to write headlines. And after all, what is a <title>element but a headline on a search listing? So the big question is how do you find out which of these different ways of approaching things will work the best to increase CTRs?</p> <p>Answer: you will never know unless you test.</p> <p>Unfortunately you can't test <title> element and META description content directly. But you can test it indirectly using PPC. Here's how:</p> <ol> <li>Set up a number of low-budget PPC campaigns for the keywords you are targeting organically</li> <li>Test a few ad variations that push different buttons for your audience</li> <li>Adapt the one with the best CTR to fit your <title> tag and META description.</li> </ol> <p>Do this a few times and you should start seeing some commonality in your best performers, at which point you will know what works best for your audience. But keep testing, because you never know when something will surprise you (and because PPC is a perfectly viable medium for any online marketing effort).</p> <p>At the same time:</p> <ul> <li>Make sure all your authorship tagging is in place</li> <li>Use microdata as outlined on schema.org to get any rich snippets that you can</li> <li>Use Moz Analytics or a combination of Screaming Frog and Excel to make sure your <title> tags and META descriptions are unique.</li> </ul> <p>Between <title> elements optimised for CTR, META descriptions working hard, and rich snippets you should have all your bases covered.</p></title>

I wrote a post a couple of months ago which analysed a load of Mozcast data and one of the subjects I touched upon was EMDs and PMDs. Looking at that data I'd say don't bother switching domains.

The reason, to quote directly from the post is that

"Looking purely at the trends, the proportion of listings with exact (EMD) and partial (PMD) matched domains is definitely going down. A few updates in particular have had an effect: One huge jolt in December 2012 had a particular and long-lasting effect, knocking 10% of EMDs and 10% of PMDs out of the listing"

The conclusion was that

"if you plan on creating useful, interesting content for your industry then go ahead and buy a domain with a keyword or two in. You could even buy the exact match domain, even if that doesn't match your brand (although this might give people trust issues, which is a whole different story). But if you don't plan on creating that content, buying a keyword-matched domain looks unlikely to help you, and you could even be in for a more rocky ride in the future than if you stick to your branded domain."

I'd second your recommendation for Appthemes' Vantage. I've used it before with a client and it's a great theme. The developers are pretty responsive (if you'll pardon the pun) to questions as well.

Hi Kevin,

In my experience the answer to this question depends on a few things:

• Where the links come from
• The website owner's relationships with the websites that link to them
• The amount of effort that can be put into moving all of those links

Of course all pages should be 301'd just in case, but the problem with this is that the value of links passing through a 301 reduces over time. So all the value of all the hard work you've put into SEO in the past will decrease.

What has worked for me in the past is running a report through Open Site Explorer, looking at the domains linking to the site, and seeing whether you and your client can contact any of them to get the link changed after go-live. If someone can dedicate time to this and the people linking to you are amenable to changing then it's a really good way of getting the maximum value for those old links. And perhaps rekindling old relationships while you do so, getting more links and more revenue

While Chris's answer is correct, it may be useful to tie things down to websites a bit more. In this case, an asset is any kind of media that goes on the site. In the same way that assets like chairs, computers, and desks are the things that make up a company's assets, all of the things like videos, images, downloadable PDFs, and infographics are the assets that make up a website's assets. So an infographic is just one type of asset.

As Chris says, an asset is something that has a value. So a chair is an asset because you can sell it on eBay for an amount of money, and you can estimate its value by looking at other chairs on eBay. The value of an infographic could be measured in a range of different ways, from the number of new social media followers it brings you to the lifetime predicted revenue of those social media followers depending on your goals and reporting.

The .edu TLD is only available to institutions in the US. Further, it's limited to US-affiliated higher education institutions. So if your client were to purchase a .edu domain then anybody coming to the site would expect them to be US-based. But different countries do have their own education-related second-level .ac domains. So here in the UK ours is -surprise, surprise - .ac.uk.

I've not seen any recent correlation data on whether having a .edu will improve rankings. I know there has been a lot of talk over the last few years about .edu/.ac and .org domains being inherently "more trustworthy" than other domain types, but my personal opinion is that's confusing correlation and causation:  trustworthy institutions usually have .edu domains, it isn't the domain making them trustworthy. So changing to a .edu domain almost definitely won't help your rankings. It especially won't help your domain authority because this metric is concerned with measuring a range of things that you won't be changing, like your link profile..

Thinking about it, if changing to  a .edu domain were to help your rankings in the US because that's a primarily US TLD then that same logic say that change would also harm rankings in your client's home country, which they definitely won't want!

Hi Stephen.

Google try their best to serve up relevant results to everyone (or at least that's the assumption we make. Whether it's true or not is, I'm sure, something people could debate for hours) and have a very complex algorithm for doing that. The algo' changes that make up Penguin and Panda may have had the effect of pushing other sites above yours because they are more authoratative in other areas than <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">thomassmithfasteners.com</a>.

I would definitely back up your disavow requests with the information you suggest; I'm not sure how much of a difference they make but if they do then they're great to have and if they don't then at least you're keeping a record of your activity. Here's Google's instructions, which do contain comments on when attempts were made to contact site owners.

Good luck!

Ben

P.S. I've just found this ebook at Hubspot. If a file storage company can produce good enough content to be featured on Hubspot then Thomas Smith Fastenings should definitely be able to create something!

Hi Stephen,

The link removal requests may help you clean things up somewhat, and hopefully the new site will improve engagement and conversion rates (both highly important). Blog posts can also be a very good thing, as they increase the amount of relevant content on the site, fixing the technical errors should help search engine crawling and indexation, and on-site SEO is always a helpful place to start. But on-site will only get you so far.

Looking at your blog, it seems that each post is tweeted about once (except the latest, which has two tweets) and shared on Google+ a couple of times. You also mention you have not built any new links recently, so your problem may be less about what you have done in the past and more about what your competitors are doing today that you are not.

If your competitors are running PR or marketing campaigns which earn them links and are using social media to reach out to more than a handful of people they will be gaining authority while you remain static. Definitely continue with your link removal requests - and disavowing of links after a week or two if you don't hear anything from those directories - but also think about moving forward: put together a marketing strategy that includes digital, build up an editorial calendar, and work out how to use social media effectively (for example you could send Tom White an email next time you blog about him, or tweet the people your reps meet at Silverstone with things they might be directly interested in).

Build things that people will want to share - whether that's an infographic or a video of you working with a couple of other small companies to build a Rube Goldberg machine filled with your nuts and bolts (Honda did a whole ad based around sprockets and bits of windscreen wipers). Tell people about those things and work with other people who will also get the word out (this is called fusion marketing and can be a great way of getting yourselves out these). I know what you're likely to say about being a boring industry, but to head that question off at the pass I'll direct you to Ross Hudgens' recent webinar Content Marketing in Boring Industries. In short, take where you are as a standing point and think about how you can start running - rather than looking over your shoulder at Panda, Penguins, and other animals from the Google zoo.

Hope that helps!

The term "canonical" comes from maths. It means "the standard form to present something in". So, if you have two or more things that are very similar or identical then you might want to say "this is the canonical version - the standard thing we will refer to".

For example, if your CMS is a bit old-school and creates two versions of a page - one human-friendly like example.com/blog-post and another horrible one like example.com?id=12397863294862395 - then you want to point search engines to the nice one and say "this is the standard, canonical version - refer to that one". So in this case you should definitely use on example.com?id=1239786329486239 to give search engines that instruction. If you also add this to example.com/blog-post then that's fine - all you are saying is "this is the standard version of this page" which is perfectly valid.

But from your question, this doesn't sound like your plan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your plan sounds like you will tell the search engines something along the lines of "you see that blog post there, and that one there, and that one there, and that one over there? They're actually all the same thing, and the standard, canonical page you should refer to is this category page". That wouldn't be a good idea, because all of those articles are different things.

So, I wouldn't add a hard-coded canonical URL into your template. Instead - as long as your CMS allows it - add the canonical tag to the of each article and link to the search engine friendly version of each blog post.

I was answering on the assumption that "exactly the same" meant "exactly the same as on my old site". Hope I got that assumption correct!

I'm definitely not saying that if you write a long post it won't be engaging - my last YouMoz post was over 2,000 words long, has had more than 40 comments and been tweeted about more than 400 times (self plug over). Long, engaging content that gets people talking is just as good as short content that gets people talking!

My point - and I think Chris's - was that if your article can be written in 200 words, don't put a load of filler in there to get to 1,000 because that's longer. You're likely to get less engagement, and so less tweets, shares, +1s, and backlinks. And when it comes to the ranking algo's that social interaction and linking is what you need to aim for, not length of article.

As an aside, I can't remember the last time Seth Godin wrote more than a couple of hundred words - and he seems to be doing alright!

I've not heard of Google looking at spelling and grammar specifically - could you point me to where you heard that, as I'd be interested in seeing it? But again, that could actually be an engagement question: "are people more likely to comment on a post if other comments are well written?" The thing about comments is that they somebody else's voice, not yours, so if you start editing those people's voices they may feel a bit aggrieved and so may be less likely to comment in the future. That will drive down the number of tweets, share, links etc and so adversely affect your SEO.

Search engines look at the content on all of your page, so comments will count as well. Get lots of engagement on a short article and you've got as many words on the page as if you'd written a short article and got no comments.

I would tend to agree with Chris though. Thinking about quality, engagement, and relevance will get you much more in the long term than just writing long articles that don't engage people.

Working agency-side I've gone through a few of these exercises, and I'd advise doing them as soon as you have the copywriting started. META data takes a surprising length of time to create - a 65 character title tag sounds like it shouldn't take much to write, but precisely because you're so constrained it takes some thought. So when you have your sitemap and know the gist of each page, put together the META data for it.

If you're now onto deployment and its too late for that, I'd say leave it until after the roll out. You got where you are with the titles and descriptions you have - and you have plenty to worry about without adding META data!

I guess this is less of a question about SEO for HuffPost and others than about reader engagement - I'd be fascinated to see whether anybody who runs a news site or blog with a large number of page views (cough Moz cough) has data on this.

Going with my gut, I would say that longer headlines give the reader more of an idea about exactly what they're going to read, so they are probably more likely to engage with the post than if you used a shorter of headline. Of course, with bounces and other engagement metrics potentially being part of the search engine algorithms that might give you a bit of an SEO boost.