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Assuming there's a logical business reason to link them I would do it but I would take the following precautions:

1. Don't over optimize the anchor text. Use branded anchor text or something like that.

2. Make sure each property has a distinctly different link profile. In other words getting a Forbes link to each of the properties doesn't make much sense and it definitely doesn't signal natural link acquisition to Google.

3. Monitor the rankings and GWT metrics for the properties for the first few months after linking them and see if you see any noticeable decline in traffic or rankings. If so, I would take the links down.

I've been doing Local SEO for 9 years and have never had an issue that frustrated me as much as this one. I have a client who I can't get past the 15th page of Google's SERPS for their #1 KW. Here are the details:

• The domain is 4 months old
• In that 4 month span the site has gone from a DA 1 to a DA 24
• Spam score is a 0. I know this doesn't mean a ton but I can tell you from closely reviewing their AHrefs report, there's no influx of spammy links or anything like that.
• The design is a custom wordpress design
• The content is 100% unique and professionally written content
• The backlink profile (in my opinion) is full of high DA and PA sites from authority sites with high trust flow ... in my opinion their backlinks are superior to all but maybe a handful of competitors.
• I was not expecting 1st page results by now but I would have expected top 50 results a the very least. But to not crack the top 15 tells me there's some major issue here.

I really need some insight as to what could be holding me back here ... I don't want to share the domain publicly but but I will PM you it if you're interested in taking a crack at it. I will seriously pay someone a small fortune if they can help me figure this out.

Thank you Miriam. Those are awesome resources all of which I am familiar with

There are some obvious issues with the backlink profile on this particular site. I've pointed it out to the client as something hazardous and their current SEO is framing it as a difference of opinion when in reality he is putting the client at great risk (in my opinion).

My hope was get a third party to look at this and offer an honest assessment to the client.

Btw, I'm not opposed to paying someone for their time here.

Thanks again!

I have a business i'm working with right now who wants to improve their rankings in a very competitive legal niche.

Are there any Local SEO gurus out there that would be willing to explain in a paragraph or two what's going wrong?

Let me know if you'd like to help and I'll PM you the domain.

Cool site.

I agree, with Egols comment, I think Google is treating these pages as being low quality because there isn't much content on the pages. If you're familiar with worpdress, Google often does the same thing with all the hundreds of pages that WP makes for blog categories, tags, etc.

I would test this theory by picking a few of the random pages and adding some content that is well optimized and see how it performs.

Yes exactly, in that case I would expand my radius to include the nearest metropolitan area. I would maybe not try to encompass the entire city of a city like say Denver, but a portion of it.

In my experience, if you get overly ambitious with your service area, you end up with very poor results.

I would ask yourself this question, how big is the radius around your office, where if you were to rank #1, would give you enough business to earn a living and grow your business, but not too much business where you're overwhelmed? That's where I would I would "cast my net" so to speak. Get rankings in a smaller radius and then you can expand a little from there if you're not getting leads or exposure from there.

Have you done a scan of your website to confirm that you don't have any malware or malicious code? That would be the first thing I would do. I have had this issue a few times with hacked sites. The first thing we do is scan the site, clean it, test it and even relocate it to a new host if the server we're on is compromised.

While technically you can configure Google My Business exactly how you have done it, you are highly unlikely to get rankings across the state of Colorado because of the competition. If you were in a highly uncompetitive niche, it might work, but not for something highly competitive like internet marketing.

If you want to see results, I would cast a much more narrow net with the hopes of getting rankings in one of those cities you menation. I also would pick the city closest to my address to increase the likelihood of ranking.

So David was kind enough to look at the site and found some potential issues. In short, the home page had 57 heading tags which is excessive, there are some heading tags missing from some interior pages and there's a few pages that should be no indexed that aren't

I'm going to fix all of these, give it some time and see if this fixes the issues. I'll keep this thread updated.

Thanks David for your time!

Thanks David - I PM'd you the info

I have a client site that I am beating my head against the wall for right now. Three months into a 100% white hat campaign, we can't get him ranking in the top 150. Here's the cliffsnotes:

• Built a new wordpress website
• All on page SEO has been done and score an A+ for his primary kws
• Robots.txt is setup correctly
• .htaccess is setup correctly
• new domain
• multiple 95 DA, 50 PA links from reputable, national sites.
• Yext Local listings
• SSL, CDN, Speed optimized
• Has 19 pages indexed by Google
• Posting one blog a week for him

Granted his primary keyword is a hyper competitive kw, but still, I've been doing this for 8 years and never seen a guy be stuck on the 16th page for so long for the sort of links we are building him. I'm genuinely stumped here and could use some help.

I know I'm a little late to the game but one suggestion I would recommend reading your post is to take the synonym out of your page title on your home page. For example, I work with a lot of attorneys and if I create separate pages for "lawyer" and "attorney", I never get the respective targeted traffic ... google just ranks the more optimized, higher PA page for both terms.

If that link comes from a Wall St. Journal Property that doesn't allow just anyone to create pages with followed links (i.e. blogspot), I would anticipate that link yielding terrific long term results for your site's page and domain authority. Most small businesses have a very hard time getting those types of links so you should be very proud.

At the same time though, when it comes to linkbuilding always remember to play the long game. Every once in awhile that unicorn link that makes an instant impact comes along but generally speaking that's a result of click through traffic as a result of people clicking on that link when the page goes live ... it sounds like that's NOT the case here if I understand your post correctly so I would just keep doing what you're doing that got you that link in the first place

Also, I'm sure you've already done this but it's always a good idea to share links about your business from other sites on your social media for the bragging rights and of course, it won't hurt the value of that link to have good social signals going to it.

What about the on page SEO for the blank page? Anything there? I agree with the other guys, sounds like this blank page has some signals going to it ... possibly a really powerful link (even by accident) that could be pushing it's PA up.

Yep, I agree with both of these posts. I looked at the site on your profile and if that's the site you are thinking about hiring a writer for, I really don't see the need to pay that much for something like that unless you KNEW for a fact that it was going to be UBER compelling. In my experience, compelling content for local businesses is usually written by someone who is a) an expert in that industry and b) has an extremely unique voice. So unless this individual checks both of these boxes, I wouldn't pay anywhere near that personally.

There's a lot that could be going on here. How are the citations for each of the locations? Also have you configured the local schema on each local landing page? I wrote an article here on Moz a while back that I think might be helpful:

https://moz.com/ugc/get-your-multilocation-business-ranking-in-multiple-cities-with-one-domain-21815

It depends on the purpose and quality of the content. If this is just regular content that you normally post to your site, I would post it.

On the other hand, if the content was a piece that I really thought would be a difference maker and really impactful compared to my "regular" (I know, I know - all content is impactful) content. I would hold off and post the content when I launch the new site to give my audience a legit reason to check out the new eye candy.

Google will do this as they see fit in an effort to connect users with the content they are looking for. They will even serve multiple page titles for the same page based on the user search. The factors that determine that are anchor text to the URL and click through rates for specific kws. Essentially Google will treat your SERPs like their own personal Adwords ad, where they will tinker with the ad copy to achieve their desired result.

Yes Bethany - it's data that Google organizes but you can accomplishment for someone else by using structured data like in the link Dmitril provided.

Sounds like a faulty CMS issues ... what sort of CMS is it?

Agree with John. That link is pure, unadulterated 24k SEO gold. It's dofollow, it comes from a 92 DA web site ... it will pay SEO dividends for years to come. Also it's much better than a typical press release because all credible press release platforms have changed their links to "nofollow" at the urging of Google in the last year or two. Kudos to you for putting in the effort to get that.

I think this question depends on how many products you have, how many products you eventually want to grow to and what your keyword goals are. For example, if you have 5 specific products and don't want to expand to say more than 15 in the next 5 years, in my opinion, you don't need to use all the categories. Categories are for organizing data and/or targeting category kws. If there's not much data to organize and your long tail URLs efficiently target your kws ... then I would stick with that.

Sorry, yes, adding a directory is exactly like adding a domain or a subdomain to Webmaster tools. Just add the full url, confirm ownership and you're all set

​I can't give you anything other than anecdotal evidence here but yes. I would recommend this. If for the very least, you can see that a specific directory in WMT has the proper geo kws associated with it. The driving principle here is this: Google has more data than any company on the planet and one of their biggest challenges is organizing that data to help their users. If there's anything I can do to help them organize that data in an accurate manner, that helps their users, I do it.

Perhaps I'm the squeaky wheel here, and I understand that's not the culture on these forums (which I'm ALL for 99.9999% of the time) ... but to me, if the DA's are going to go back up, why drop them?  For us, DA is something we educate our clients on, we preach it's credibility/accuracy, and we ask our clients to hold us accountable to it. But now, I'm going to have to essentially undermine its credibility to explain to my clients that this is a large scale drop and it should go back up again soon.

I'm done being the squeaky wheel now. I am a big believer in DA and Moz in general ... these forums have the sharpest people in the industry. I just felt compelled to express some frustration.

awesome, awesome answer here man. thanks for taking the time to respond. I went in and setup WMT for the old sites and things are looking a little bit better now.

Be warned, this is a complex issue that I have and will require someone who has some advanced knowledge about 301s and link penalty’s.  I have a law firm client whose site is having some issues. There are some very complex details here so I'm going to articulate them in bullet points in hopes of making the issues easy to understand.

So here's my root problem:

1. We have poor organic rankings (4th, 5th, 6th page for most terms) despite Domain Authority of 32 (avg. 1st page competitor is 28) and some very strong white hat link building the last 60 days or so.

How's their backlink profile look, you ask?

1. When you look at their backlink profile in OSE, their spam score is a 1/17 (not sure if that's credible in any way).
2. Lot's of links that score 5's on the spam score make up about 10% of their OSE links.
3. Here’s where it gets tricky; those links are not directed the client's New URL, they are links that go to some old URLs the client used to have, for which they had an SEO guy who built all those crappy links. Those URLs with the crappy links (we'll call them The Crappy URLs) were 301'd (can we all agree 301'd is a verb?) to the NEW URL for just a couple of months. Shortly after that, NEW URL dropped almost completely out of Google, so the client turned off the 301s.
4. So despite those 301s being turned off, OSE still shows all the links going to The Crappy URLs but is giving The New URL credit for them. Keep in mind, the 301s were turned off about 6 months ago so it’s a little strange that OSE still shows those 301s.
5. This has led me to the conclusion that the Domain Authority that OSE shows of 32, is not a “real” number since it is seemingly based off links inherited from 301s that no longer exist.

So now I’m trying to create an action plan for this client that will hopefully help us start to make some real progress in our rankings. This client does not have the budget to wait another 6 months for some sign of hope so time is of the essence. Here’s my theoretical action plans I’m choosing from and would like the communities input on which, if any, they feel is best (Also, if I’m missing something or you have an idea, I’m all ears): **Potential Action Plans: **

1. Do nothing, keep building quality links, creating quality content, monitor crawl reports/gwt for issues. That strategy is going to win long term.
2. #1 + Create one page sites on The Crappy URLs, setup GWT for them, submit sitemaps thus forcing Google, OSE and other web crawlers to index them, thus removing any potential residual penalties from the 301s. NOTE: Currently The Crappy URLS are just landing on GoDaddy’s default landing page which is of course not being indexed by Google or OSE.
3. #2 + Disavow all the bad links going to The Crappy URLS. Then once the bad links no longer appear in the OSE profile for each of The Crappy Sites, 301 them again, thus inheriting the good links but not the bad.
4. #1 + 301 the Crappy URLS back to the New URL, while also disavow any links going to The Crappy URLs. The logic here is that if the road back to recovery is going to be a few months away no matter what, when the 301 knocked them back 6 months ago no reputable link building was being done. I am cautiously optimistic the linkbuilding we are doing will eventually off set any penalty’s coming from the 301s. Plus now we’ll know the 32 Domain Authority OSE is giving us is real. This is the one I’m leaning towards quite frankly because I think it will reduce the recovery time and we’ll know somewhat quickly (30-60 days) if it’s actually working. 1-3 could each take 90 days before we know if it’s working.

So please, if you have any expertise with any of this, your help or advice would be appreciated. I’d rather not share The New URL for obvious reasons but if you must know, simply message me and as long as you’re legit, I’ll share it with you.

I thought you claimed the old competitor page and tried to input your client's info for their Google+ page.

If that's not the case and you've already set up a Google+ page, there's nothing that needs to be done in my opinion.

I'm not sure that I would have had them change their number prior to reading this story, so as much as I would like to say yes and sound smart, I would have probably played it the same way. Especially when you think of the benefits of old customers of the competitor calling your client looking for the same services.

Crazy, I have quite a bit of experience with this exact scenario: law firms using geo subdomains to target specific areas.
Here's my findings and suggestions based on actual results and experience:

1. SEO on domain.com benefits atlanta.domain.com. This is a fact. If Starbucks decided to create subdomains tomorrow for every location, their subdomains would benefit from 91 DA. That's how Findlaw, lawyers.com and all those guys get first page placement with high DA and low PA.
2. Digital Diameter is right, subdomains are more effective and directories are more efficient. UNLESS you have a really good multi-site CMS. Then you can be equally efficient and more effective.

I hope this answers your question, if you want some help or have any other questions, PM me.

Obviously these are not duplicate pages but I think your pages are drawing the duplicate content flags because

1. You have the same h1 for each one (man vs. world) and
2. Your content other than your actual picture is all very similar (i.e. disclaimer)
3. You have no alt image tags so the crawler has no idea what sort of image it's looking at
4. Your URLS are very similar (I'd switch to a more SEO friendly URL structure if your CMS allows)

I would fix #1-3 for sure since those are pretty easy fixes and then see if that causes the notices to cease. If not, I would fix #4 as well. Long term, you are going to want to fix #4 regardless so you might as well bite the bullet.

1. Yes, make sure description is different for each page
2. So are there two pages in two different categories or one page being crawled twice? If it's two seperate pages in different categories I would change the title tag to something like 'Product X Category 1' and then 'Product X Category 2'. I would do the same thing with the description as well. If it's one page being crawled (possibly indexed twice) I would pick a category based on potential traffic and get rid of the 2nd category.
3. Who's they? I'm not understanding this canonical question
4. It should not make a difference whether you're using a full url or short url format.

You want to create Google+ Local Page for every one of your locations, possibly one for your brand as well. Ideally, you want a unique URL for each location as well. Once you create a page for your Google+ Local page it will automatically 'merge' your Google Places page to your new Google+ Local Page, provided you selected your Google Places page when you claimed your Google+ Local Page.

I believe what's coming, is that Google is going to force Google Places users to manage their businesses on Google+ Local.

I believe your current configuration is hurting your long term SEO.

My preferences would rank as follows:

1. company name + country specific TLD (company.de, company.uk, company.com
2. subdomain on .com uk.company.com, de.company.com
3. directory on .com company.com/uk/, company.com/de/

That's my .02

So I have a couple of questions about 301 redirects:

1. Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301? I've done 20+ domain 301s in the last year and have yet to see it happen, but the other day I read a an article (or maybe it was a QA post?) that suggested doing 302s to avoid transferring penalties. Has anyone seen any authoritative information regarding this?
2. I 301'd a domain in February that another SEO firm had built a lot of spammy links and I began building contextual links for it at a very slow rate (like 10 or so a month). Within a month, my domain authority was a 26 on the new domain and my inbound links were non existent. By month 2, my links were 70k and domain authority was 34. By month 3, down to 25k inbound links and domain authority of 29, where it has settled for the last 3 months despite some really high quality links. My question (don't worry it's coming), is does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped? I'm assuming the 301 links kicked in and then only about 45% ended up 'sticking'??

Thanks in advance

I would imagine that you would see drop n traffic if you began to receive traffic immediately a upon creating the 301. I would leave it in place unless theres a really compelling reason (that I can't think of) to remove it.

All those scenarios look good to  me. I think they are great ways to leverage offline relationships for online value. I would perhaps be careful with the last option but as long as you get a high quality, long term link I think it would be good.

I'm with you, I like having the separate content. I'm sure if you do that you will link all of content so that someone looking for a particular piece of content can quickly navigate by title or something like that. I think doing that way you can target broad keywords for each of the eight topics and if they're in depth, I would imagine the long tail opportunities will be there as well.

To me this solution satisfies the human/user experience part as well as the search engines, your eight landing pages will get some love because of how narrow in scope they.

I'm not sure I'm understanding your question but have you made sure that you have imported your conversions (Goals in Analytics) into Adwords?

A ratio of 1:100 words for targeted key words is a rule of thumb that has worked well for me.

Mark - I agree with Dennis. You have some competitive metrics but best case scenario you are mid to bottom of page one currently, in terms of expectations.

I think Mark has the right idea, I would build out a landing page on your main site for the keyword, then 301 the emd back to it. Bottom line, emd results are short lived.

Richard - can you provide a little more information about your site? It's going to be impossible to offer any real insight here without some specific details.

I agree completely...and yes I think when it's not possible to have individual pages, combining but doing so strategically and sparingly is key here. You want to maintain good keyword density for your most lucrative keywords.

I think that is exactly the right strategy - cherry pick when to use follow links

1. Yes, worry. 301 those old page to your new page or new web site.
2. I don't know if this is a question but I'm assuming you're talking about the links from the first question and whether they are meaningful. I say yes. Nofollow links are a critical component to a solid link profile.

3. I would not worry about this. Again, a natural link profile will have anchor text that is not ideal.

I have a different opinion based on my extensive experience working with subdomains. The big advantage to working with subdomains, is that they all benefit from the Domain Authority of the root url.

If you owned tacobell.com (with a DA of 80) and decided to create a web site on a subdomain for each location like tambabay.tacobell.com, that subdomain would benefit immediately from the root.

In my experience is the same is true for penalties, regardless of how the subdomains are linked, if in the example above, tacobell.com begins the spammiest seo campaign of all time, tampabay.tacobell.com absolutely will incur some, if not all of the wrath.

Yes, unfortunately, there's nothing else you can do for SERPS for specific keywords that are being flooded with 'news' like this. I would just wait it out for a couple of weeks and see if those results go away. If not, perhaps modify my on page optimization to target some related keywords that are not affected.