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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.

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.

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.

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: 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? 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). Lot's of links that score 5's on the spam score make up about 10% of their OSE links. 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. 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. 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: ** Do nothing, keep building quality links, creating quality content, monitor crawl reports/gwt for issues. That strategy is going to win long term. #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. #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. #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.

So I have a couple of questions about 301 redirects: 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? 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 have a site that sells widgets. It's called widgets.com. I want to sell widgets locally in 10 different geographic areas so my url structure/kw goal is as follows: URL                                       KW I Hope to Rank For
widgets.com                         'Widgets'
widgets.com/houston/          'Houston Widgets'
widgets.com/dallas/              'Dallas Widgets' So I've optimized my site accordingly where my home page has no Geo optimization and my 'city pages' are all geo optimized, complete with hcard brick and mortar addresses that are all legit offices that sell our widgets. My problem, is that despite all that, my home page (which again, is not geo-optimized) is now ranking for 'Dallas Widgets'. This is messing up my strategy and very frustrating because the home page does not have any information Dallas residents will find helpful about widgets. So my question is, am I better off just owning this 'Dallas' label is forcing on my site and just optimize the home page for dallas and keep the rest of the 9 cities in their directories? Does anyone have any experience with getting pigeonholed geographically speaking?

I have a client who is consolidating multiple EMD domains into a single domain for SEO reasons and for practical reason, like not having to produce content and perform SEO for 20 domains. My question is this: Do I need to 301 every single page from these old EMD domains? I bill this client hourly and while I could take the time to write 301s for literally thousands of pages I feel that this might not be the best use of his money, that I could strategically 301 the landing pages that get traffic and then route everything else to the new root domain...thoughts? I've researched this and have not been able to hear a really strong opinion yet.

I have read numerous intelligent, well informed responses to this question but have yet to hear a definitive answer from an authority. Here's the situation. Let's say I have a company who's URL is www.awesomecompany.com who provides one service called 'Awesome Service' This company has 20 franchises in the 20 largest US cities. They want a uniform online presence, meaning they want their design to remain consistent across all 20 domains. My question is this; what's the best domain or url structure for these 20 sites? Subdomain - dallas.awesomecompany.co Unique URL - www.dallasawesomecompany.com Directory - www.awesomecompany.com/dallas/ Here's my thoughts on this question but I'm really hoping someone b*tch slaps me and tells me I'm wrong: Of these three potential solutions these are how I would rank them and why: Subdomains Pros: Allows me to build an entire site so if my local site grows to 50+ pages, it's still easy to navigate Allows me to brand root domain and leverage brand trust of root domain (let's say the franchise is starbucks.com for instance) Cons: This subdomain is basically a brand new url in google's eyes and any link building will not benefit root domain. Directory Pros Fully leverages the root domain branding and fully allows for further branding If the domain is an authority site, ranking for sub pages will be achieved much quicker Cons While this is a great solution if you just want a simple map listing and contact info page for each of your 20 locations, what if each location want's their own "about us" page and their own "Awesome Service" page optimized for their respective City (i.e. Awesome Service in Dallas)? The Navigation and potentially the URL is going to start to get really confusing and cumbersome for the end user. Think about it, which is preferable?: dallas.awesomcompany.com/awesome-service/ www.awesomecompany.com/dallas/awesome-service (especially when www.awesomecompany.com/awesome-service/ already exists Unique URL Pros Potentially quicker rankings achieved than a subdomain if it's an exact match domain name (i.e. dallasawesomeservice.com) Cons Does not leverage the www.awesomecompany.com brand Could look like an imposter It is literally a brand new domain in Google's eyes so all SEO efforts would start from scratch Obviously what goes without saying is that all of these domains would need to have unique content on them to avoid duplicate content penalties. I'm very curious to hear what you all have to say.

Here's my issue, I have an Air Conditioning client for whom I've been managing their SEO and Adwords PPC for the past year. The SEO is going good, we are seeing tangible results every month will soon be on page 1 for their most competitive keyword. On the adwords side, we are having some major issues though and I'm racking my brain. We are somehow getting quality scores in the 2's and 3's on the regular. I've streamlined my campaigns down to the city and within those I've streamlined my keyword groups into the following groups: City (Campaign) - AIr Conditioning (keyword group) - AC Repair (keyword group) - Fix AC (keyword group) - Contractor (keyword group) - Air Conditioner (keyword group) Every keyword we're bidding on falls nicely into one of these keyword groups and we're putting about 10 key words in each. Landing pages have exact phrase match in page title, h1, bold words, contact form and a coupon image with all the meta tags indicating the image offer matches the offer in our ads. We are running 3-4 ads in each keyword and testing new ads almost daily. Still getting 2s and 3s on the highest trafficked keywords (air conditioning & ac repair). I've read everything out there, I signed up for wordstream which had some decent recommendations (basically break your ad groups into smaller verticals) which I've implemented to no avail. I'm beginning to think Google is just hustling all these companies in service industry who they know rely on adwords to get phone calls in the summer - especially the HVAC industry. I'm running out of ideas here other than just going to Vegas and putting all my client's on black at the roulette wheel. Seems like a much more fun way to piss away thousands of dollars and at least they'll give me some cocktails.