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Dr. Pete,

I have a internal debate going and I was hoping you might be a tie breaker on rel=canonical vs noindex given these paginated pages and might be a good use case for others:

https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park

https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park/page-2

The individual list items are unique, but clearly want to rank for essentially the exact same terms.  Page titles, metas, copy about cit is the same.  Just the list elements are different, but not a 12 pack of pens, 24 pack etc.  Is this tricky or clear?

Oleg, I like your thought process on this.

I am dealing with this exact issue and have 2 brilliant minds arguing over what is best approach.  In reviewing the above, I agree with the approach.  Canonical links to the first page of "Honda-civic-coupe" makes perfect sense.

Total we use prev-next, but self-refer rel=canonical the URL's on subsequent pages, but are not no-indexing page 2+.  The negative impact is that Google will from time to time, add as site-links to the #1 search result a pagination page (e.g., 6 ) and some pagination pages are indexed.  Landing page traffic to these is near zero.  Our decision is determining whether to non-index or rel-canonical to the first page.

The pages in my case are new home communities where we might be listing all the different communities that are luxury communities in the specific city.  While they are all this same category, as a group can be described similarly, and will have near duplicate metas, each community (list element) is unique.  So, page #1 can be viewed as quite differentiated.

Here are the arguments:

1. Rel=canonical to the first page.  As much as we think each shingle (i.e., page of 15 communities) is unique. The 15 Descriptions, amenities, location, what it is near, things you can do there are unique,  As a group it can be considered just a list of communities.  By pointing back to page #1 we are saying this is a collecting list of 3 pages of luxury communities in a given city.  This will concentrate authority to the page that is most relevant.

2. No-index the subsequent pages.  When Google said near duplicate, they really were considering limiting that scope to pages where the items are exactly the same or nearly the same.  If the individual page content due to the differentiated product can be seen as unique content simply due to the in-page list elements, they are not really duplicate and rel=canonical is inappropriate.  To use rel=canonical would at some point be viewed as manipulative and over-reaching use of rel=canonical.  While this may cause this page to rank better, it may be considered not okay at some point.

Option #1 would seem to have a better immediate rank impact, but is there some real risk that it would be considered manipulative since the pages would not look to Google as near enough duplicates?

Glad to hear what you or others have to say.

Is there a way to turn off the Google Security feature that kicks someone out after logging into the account because it isn't a trusted computer or in a different location?

Miriam,

Not sure how I missed your response.  Great answer.  We are really a consortium, so I am seeking a general solution not just one for a client. Based on the linked thread and your advice, here’s what I think all home builders should do regarding their sales offices and Local SEO:

1. If you have an onsite sales office, do a Google Places listing for it.  Blow it out with pictures, relevant copy and anything of use to the target persona.
2. Make sure you add a geo coordinates as Google and others may be lagging your land development efforts.
3. When the sales office is ready to close, delete everything that is possible to delete in the Google Places account.  Makes sure names, pictures, and other content are removed.
4. Market the business as closed.  At the time of closing, check for options for reclassifying as a residence.  While they do not have this function today, those #googlers are darn smart and they will figure out a way to allow locations to change from residence to business or the reverse someday soon.

I've received a strange response from Google Places on local listings for a home builder.  Google's rep suggested that we not list the new home sales center (a model home) since at some point it will change from being a business listing to a residential listing.  That is just wrong.  It will be a place of business for the next 3 years and then will flip to being a private residence.

These days it is uncommon, but not that rare to turn over ownership from public to private or vice versa (A residence becoming a law or other commercial establishment.  Or a whole office building becoming condos.)

The issue is, when it does happen, how do we get Google and others to recognize that a business is no longer a business location? I've had trouble bringing down the address of former former model home sales centers on Google Places much to the chagrin of the residents.

We are similar.  Our clients, 1,000+ home builders, are all local. Anything you do to rank locally for properties, is short lived and probably perceived as gaming Google.  That said, you can rank for "where to List Your Property" type terms.  You can leverage any real address you have that is legitimate.  Setting us executive office options for this is probably also not a long-term strategy.  There is an alternative.

Have you considered providing local SEO services to your clients?  This is not just new revenue, but an opportunity to get your clients to stick.  Help them with local SEO and you will naturally promote them.  They will link to you because it makes sense.  You dominate your terms, they dominate in the 7-pack/map-pack.

Doug,

Somehow I missed your response.  The site has 200 pages or so linked from the navigation.  Thanks for the suggestion.  Adding some links or breadcrumbs may help.

Ideally what I would want to do is have google crawl to the important pages and not have juice flow to customer service / info only pages that in most cases have little need to rank in the SERP's.

The client wants flat navigation, and I understand the point (you can be anywhere and find these pages).  The drawback is spraying juice to non-relevant pages from a SEO perspective.  If there is a way to block crawling that is not considered cloaking, that would be the approach.

Thanks for answering.

Good Answer.

I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content.  The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic.  The issue is how they link and what it looks like.

We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP.  The growth rate is exponential.  The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source.

The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed.  While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me.  I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag.  We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing.

Is this the right approach?  What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns?

Blair

Miriam, thank you for the thoughtful response. I guess it is a lot of work With no shortcuts. Blair

Note: I am not interested in paying for services to build citations for me.

I am managing building a client's citations. On many sites I am asked to create an account and verify my information. I have tried to create accounts using my client's email address and specified password so that they can manage their citations down the road should their NAP change.

However, many sites require further verification such as security questions or a phone code. It isn't practical or effective to ask a client to confirm and verify all of these accounts. What is the most effective way to manually build local citations for a client? How can I get around the issue of email and phone verification?

I have a client with a very flat navigational structure relying on a menu with CSS hover dropdowns using simple

• items to get to just about every page on the site through the main navigation on every page.  They want this ability to remain.  The issue is stat is send link juice all over and does not concentrate into pages that are key search landing pages.  I don't want to "no Index" "follow" the less important pages since there are some brand related long tail searches that I would want these pages found.  These are useful pages to consumers who are already engaged with the brand, but not ones we would not care to rank for outside of branded search.

  If there was a way to have some links be non-crawled via javascript (or some other method) and those that are more important use a more standard html type link that would seem ideal.

  Does anyone have a suggestion for menu tool or technique for exposing to consumers all the links to consumers but restricting google bot's path while being in line with Google Webmaster guideslines?

  Blair

One of my analysts found this form a WBF in Ausgust:

“The fourth YouTube ranking factor on the content side is transcription. This is something that most people don't know about. I'm going to tell you about it today. That is that YouTube has a feature where it's going to try to transcribe your video for you, and it is horrible at transcribing your video. If you've ever tried to read the transcription that it does by machine, it is awful. However, something else that they don't tell you is that they use those transcriptions to rank your video for keywords.

So, if you were to slip something, and there's actually been some tests done on this, where someone transcribes a video and throws in a word that isn't mentioned anywhere in the description, anywhere in the title, and then you type that in a search in YouTube and up comes that video. They are indexing the transcriptions. So take the time to go ahead and transcribe your video word for word. Upload the text file. It will match up the words. It will then make your video closed caption, which will increase your click through rate, and it will also allow you to rank better for that video. Just a quick tip on that. Definitely worth doing. If you're going to take all the time to make the video, take a few extra minutes and transcribe it and make it happen.”

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/youtube-ranking-factors-whiteboard-friday

Phil,

Thanks.  You were the first to point out the defining reason for transcription: "YouTube's machine generated transcriptions don't get indexed, but transcripts you upload will."

That's really what was not clear to me.  I guess if I were Google and owned YouTube, I would to index CC, but I am not.

At least for now it seems transcription is well worth the effort.

We had recently tested them.  I think that will be our route.

thanks for the +1 vote on Dana's comments.  We did the first 80 videos transcribed via an elance contractor, but I think the service is probably the route to go.

Thanks for the reply Dana.  I guess I was getting concerned over somehow the transcription being considered duplicate content.  You actually answered the better question of how should we deal with transcriptions in general.

With 700+ videos to transcribe, nice to get it right the first time.  The service we are considering is speakertext.com.  I believe they can automate the CC need.

So, You Tube allows plenty of room from descriptions.  I think 5,000 characters.  Google does a poor Closed Caption of our audio.  Should I also be adding accurate transcriptions to the description field in YouTube to help my Video SEO.

What are the pro's cons and is it worth doing?