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So if I understand what you're saying correctly (and please correct me if I don't), once you get to the point where you're dealing with words that Google treats as synonyms and variants,  then you're generally safe to use any/all versions  interchangeably as a single "topic"? And by extension, continuing to dig into the numbers of these different variants (assuming there aren't any huge discrepancies in things like competitiveness or search volume), isn't especially useful?

Hey, something I've been thinking about lately is "where is the point of diminishing returns for keyword research detail?" I get that keyword research is important for finding out stuff like "people generally search for 'doctor' way more often than they search for 'licensed medical professional'", but what about after that? Is there much useful information to be found by sifting through spreadsheets of stats about "doctor" vs "dr" vs "doctors" vs "physician" vs "physicians" etc? Especially when Google seems to treat a lot of those as interchangable?

Or another example: If a remodeling company did basements, do you think there's much to be gleaned from AdWords data comparing "basement remodeler", "basement remodelers", basement remodeling", "basement remodeling contractor", "basement remodeling contractors", "basement renovation", "basement renovations", "basement renovators", "finished basements", "basement finishers", "basement finishing", etc.? Should those variations be analyzed and each targeted by their own sets of pages and pieces of content (e.g. a blog post that specifically targets "basement remodeler" and a blog post that targets "basement finisher" and a third blog post that specifically targets "renovated basement")

Or should the takeaway be "there aren't any combinations that people overwhelmingly prefer to use, so let's just make content about basements and topics relevant to basements. Keyword research complete."

That helps some, but there are a few things I'm a little unclear about. Thanks though!

I've been trying to wrap my head around marking up various bits of information for a local business website, and I want to make sure I understand a few things.

• If I understand Google's schema guidelines, marked up reviews should only appear on the page of a specific product, not every page, and _definitely _not the homepage, correct? Does this also mean that the LocalBusiness schema that is on every page should **not **use the AggregateRating parameter? And if the AR is only to be put on certain pages, what page should it go on if the business in question provides a service rather than selling specific products? In other words, situations where the local business _itself _is the "product" being reviewed/rated.

• Individual reviews cannot be taken from 3rd party sites (GMB, Facebook, Yelp, etc) and posted on your website with capital R Review schema (http://schema.org/Review). That markup is only to be used for reviews that have been generated on/for your site specifically. Does this also mean that the numbers used to calculate an AggregateRating have to be unique as well? In other words, if there are 10 reviews of your business on Facebook that average at 4.5/5, you can't take those individual reviews and post them on your site as marked up Reviews. But can you use that "4.5/5 based on 10 reviews" information in the AggregateRating schema?

• Can AggregateRating scores include ratings from different sources? In other words, if there were 10 ratings on Facebook and 20 on Yelp, could the AggregateRating be marked on the website as "__/5 based on 30 ratings"?

If I can simply take the numerical average and pop that into the LocalBusiness JSON markup that goes on every page automatically, alongside the other basic business info like name, phone number, and address, this will make things much easier.

Thanks!

But it is specifically about articles and not basic pages, right?

Does this mean that a website for a local business can't/shouldn't have more than 10 pages? The thing I'm hung up on (and maybe this is just a semantic thing) is how all these definitions talk about cornerstone content as articles. This makes sense for a website that is already primarily a collection of articles and posts. But for local service businesses, I feel like there's a third level of page that I'm don't know how to classify. I don't mean the category or tag pages. I mean the services page, the service area page, the about us page, the contact information page. Blog posts and articles are very useful and important, but I feel like they are supplemental to the website.

An example of the kind of page I'm unsure if it should be considered a "cornerstone article" (just a random repair shop I found, I have no relation with the company). Would this count toward the "maximum of 8-10 cornerstone articles"? http://www.friedmanautorepair.com/services/brakes/

If you were to remove the cornerstone content from a local business's website, would there still be "a website" left? I don't know, maybe this is a meaningless distinction I'm worrying about between website structure and content marketing. Maybe I'm just dancing around some kind of ontological epiphany about "what IS a website?"

Yoast, primarily. But also I'm seeing it mentioned in various blogs and some webinars I've seen.

To check that I understand the terminology, "cornerstone articles" are posts (or pages) that have some extensive, detailed, important information about a subject that other blog posts and articles can link to in reference, right? For example, a website for an auto repair shop might have a blog post about what cold weather does to a car's transmission and that post could link to a cornerstone "explainer" article that goes into more detail explaining to car-dummies like me what a transmission even DOES.

But are core pages also in this category of cornerstone content? Or are they something entirely different and should be constructed accordingly? By "core pages", I mean the base-level pages about what your business is and does. For the repair shop example, I mean things like an "About Us" page or a "Services" page*.

*or broken up into individual pages listing the services related to brakes, engine, wheels, etc.

Thanks!

Ah, that makes sense. I'll look into how our network is set up.

Thanks!

Is there a quick way of filtering the IP addresses for all the computers on a network that's using IPv6? I want to filter out visits to our websites from the devices on our office network, but each computer (and phone and tablet) seems to have a different address. It _looks _like they all start the same way, though. One computer is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:aaaa:aaaa:aaaa:aaaa, another is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:bbbb:bbbb:bbbb:bbbb, my phone is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:cccc:cccc:cccc:cccc, etc.

Does this mean that xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx is the address for our network as a whole, and I can just set up a Google Analytics filter for "IP addresses starting with..."? Or would doing that also filter out hits from, like, every visitor within a 20 mile radius of our office?

If I need to simply put in the individual addresses for each and every device, I will. I'm just hoping it doesn't come to that.

Thanks!

Hey, something I've been thinking about lately is "where is the point of diminishing returns for keyword research detail?" I get that keyword research is important for finding out stuff like "people generally search for 'doctor' way more often than they search for 'licensed medical professional'", but what about after that? Is there much useful information to be found by sifting through spreadsheets of stats about "doctor" vs "dr" vs "doctors" vs "physician" vs "physicians" etc? Especially when Google seems to treat a lot of those as interchangable?

Or another example: If a remodeling company did basements, do you think there's much to be gleaned from AdWords data comparing "basement remodeler", "basement remodelers", basement remodeling", "basement remodeling contractor", "basement remodeling contractors", "basement renovation", "basement renovations", "basement renovators", "finished basements", "basement finishers", "basement finishing", etc.? Should those variations be analyzed and each targeted by their own sets of pages and pieces of content (e.g. a blog post that specifically targets "basement remodeler" and a blog post that targets "basement finisher" and a third blog post that specifically targets "renovated basement")

Or should the takeaway be "there aren't any combinations that people overwhelmingly prefer to use, so let's just make content about basements and topics relevant to basements. Keyword research complete."

I've been trying to wrap my head around marking up various bits of information for a local business website, and I want to make sure I understand a few things.

• If I understand Google's schema guidelines, marked up reviews should only appear on the page of a specific product, not every page, and _definitely _not the homepage, correct? Does this also mean that the LocalBusiness schema that is on every page should **not **use the AggregateRating parameter? And if the AR is only to be put on certain pages, what page should it go on if the business in question provides a service rather than selling specific products? In other words, situations where the local business _itself _is the "product" being reviewed/rated.

• Individual reviews cannot be taken from 3rd party sites (GMB, Facebook, Yelp, etc) and posted on your website with capital R Review schema (http://schema.org/Review). That markup is only to be used for reviews that have been generated on/for your site specifically. Does this also mean that the numbers used to calculate an AggregateRating have to be unique as well? In other words, if there are 10 reviews of your business on Facebook that average at 4.5/5, you can't take those individual reviews and post them on your site as marked up Reviews. But can you use that "4.5/5 based on 10 reviews" information in the AggregateRating schema?

• Can AggregateRating scores include ratings from different sources? In other words, if there were 10 ratings on Facebook and 20 on Yelp, could the AggregateRating be marked on the website as "__/5 based on 30 ratings"?

If I can simply take the numerical average and pop that into the LocalBusiness JSON markup that goes on every page automatically, alongside the other basic business info like name, phone number, and address, this will make things much easier.

Thanks!

I realize that since content marketing is (or can be) a part of SEO, then it would logically follow that it's up to whoever is doing the SEO to create the content*. And when it's 1 person or a small group of people that work for 1 company, doing its SEO, that makes perfect sense. But I'm having a little trouble wrapping my mind around how that's supposed to scale up for an outside agency responsible for the SEO of 5 or 10 or 50 other companies.

One of the biggest factors in my misunderstanding of the system is the reasoning for creating content in the first place. I absolutely understand how a professional in some field (let's say dentistry for example) could write up some insightful, accurate blog post about why flossing is great. After all, a dentist does (or should, hopefully) have a level of expertise on the subject that most people don't have. That blog post is a tangible addition of value to the website for anyone curious about the subject.

But why would anyone want to read a blog post about wisdom teeth written by just some random person at a marketing company? If that person has the time to do a lot of research and BECOME something of an authority on the subject of dental care, then that's fine. But what if they also need to create content for clients that do plumbing, car repairs, and cooking? I don't really see how someone can become enough of an expert on enough subjects and still have any time to do the other parts of their job. Maybe I'm just expecting too much, but I sort of feel that the internet is already full enough of advice and information from people that have no idea what they're talking about, so content from someone that's not an expert (but is a marketing person that the expert hired) seems... frivolous to me.

So to get back to the actual question, should/can an SEO ask their clients to create at least some of their own content, or is it the SEO's responsibility to generate all the content, even if it's not always stellar? Or is it just one of those "Could God make a rock so big that he couldn't lift it? Yes, he could, and then he would lift it" (or however that saying went) sorts of deals?

Thanks for the feedback, this can all be kind of overwhelming for me at times.

*"Creating content" in this specific case meaning writing blog posts, making videos, etc.

I'll try that, thanks.

This may or may not be related to the problem, but I checked out your site in Chrome and got some error messages about Javascript files failing to load properly. One of them looks like it's connected to mobile/desktop stuff. Hope that helps!

"Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) http://trimarkfunding.com/js/jquery-1.8.3.min.js

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) http://trimarkfunding.com/js/jquery.dropotron-1.2.js

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) http://trimarkfunding.com/css/5grid/init.js?use=mobile,desktop,1000px&mobileUI=1&mobileUI.theme=none

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) http://trimarkfunding.com/js/jquery.slidertron-1.2.js

Uncaught ReferenceError: skel is not defined init.js:1"

If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page?

*The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.).

The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.).

So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed?

Thanks!