Hi Gayane,

It really comes down to a question of budget. Having a site for each location will allow you to be the most geo-targeted but if you have 5 different locations, that essentially means 5 SEO budgets. 5 lots of content (all having to be completely unique), 5x the link profiles and 5x the monitoring, planning and general campaign management.

In reality, the best option for most of us is to use a single site for all areas. Since Google looks at a lot of domain-wide metrics these days, it means if you're boosting content and links to your Las Vegas page, your LA page is going to benefit from that to an extent as well.

Rather than go into detail with ideas on how to do it, check out Rand's Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

I hope that helps!

This is a tough one and a bit of a gamble either way I suppose. If the content was absolute rubbish (maybe horrible spelling and grammar or keyword-spammed) then the suggestion would be obvious - delete them and move on.

Being that it sounds like they're "ok" but just not up to your modern standards, the decision isn't quite so simple. Having them on your site isn't going to make it any slower unless they're adding redirects or something else to your site, the issue is whether or not their low quality is hurting you and it's tough to say without seeing them.

Very generally speaking, if they're free of errors, don't spam keywords or talk about dodgy subjects like online casinos or pharmaceuticals then you're probably better off leaving them there since they will be passing some relevance signals and they are bringing you traffic.

The one other thing I'd suggest checking is user engagement on those pages. Since Google is looking at this too, having an average session duration of 4 seconds for a 2,000 word post is a pretty clear red flag that whatever that page is about isn't worthy of being in their search results.

Wow, so sorry about the slow reply here, things have been crazy the last couple of weeks!

Looking at a few of your blogs I see what you mean. They're not too bad but are probably a bit too keyword-stuff to keep as they are.

Having the keyword amongst the content isn't a problem (obviously!) but when it starts to feel unnatural, that's when you start turning users away. As an example, I had a look at this post and found the word Wyoming used 17 times in a fairly short post.

Paragraphs like this one really highlight the awkwardness:

From the moment you validate a business idea, to processing your business licensing requirements, incorporating in Wyoming, to finding the right financing, it takes up time, money, and effort.

I also noticed in that post that the first link points to the page you're already on!

Internal linking is important and for the most part appears to have been implemented quite well. If it were my website I'd be leaving the posts up but systematically working my way back through them to remove some of the keyword stuffing and fixing up any weird linking to make them read better.

As much as cutting them all and starting again would be technically correct, in the real world we need to make compromises like this to maintain existing rankings and income.

Hi Matt,

To answer your question directly, yes you will see an SEO benefit from that in the form of brand recognition and potential referral traffic.

As for ranking improvements though (what many wrongly define as "SEO Benefit"), no.

You've already raised the biggest concern which is posting a link directly to your site which can have a very spammy feel to it. Particularly if you push too hard and actually start to spam, you run the risk of getting picked up by /r/hailcorporate which pretty much marks the death of your brand on Reddit!

As with most things in SEO, if you're offering a truly valuable resource in the right way, there are only positives to be had from it, albeit indirect in this case.

Generally you'll want to hide your staging site from search engines and as Malika mentioned, the best way to do this is via robots.txt.

That lets you essentially set a rule stating that no crawlers are to access anything on that domain. Beyond that, nothing else is really relevant; if crawlers can't see your site, it doesn't matter what you do with it! You don't even need to worry about 301 redirects once this is done.

Once you apply that change in robots.txt, you may still see your staging site indexed for a little while (anywhere from hours to a couple of months) but this is normal and it will drop away soon enough.

Search engines are pretty good at determining which is the real site these days anyway!

The short answer is "nobody knows"

Whether or not it will ever show up is completely at Google's discretion. Generally speaking, the only time that carousel will display in the SERPs is if the website is highly authoritative.

If you think about it from Google's point of view, their aim is to provide the highest possible value to their searchers. If you were a local plumber who Tweets a quote or funny joke a couple of times per year, schema markup or not, displaying this in the carousel won't provide any value at all and takes up precious screen real estate.

There's no magic number (that Google is going to give us anyway) that will get it to display either. It could be a combination of Tweet volume and regularity, interaction, followers etc and is likely combined with the strength and relevance of your website in the context of your search query too.

Applying that schema is still a good idea in my opinion, it's just not as simple as "if I apply it to my site, it will definitely display in SERPs". This is true for all forms of schema markup. You're giving your site the best possible chance to display better in the SERPs but it doesn't necessarily mean it will happen.

I hope that helps!

No problem at all. To be honest, it's really not a huge deal and probably not worth the dev budget or manhours required.

In most cases with a site like this, I'd be more inclined to add good alt text for all images on the most popular pages then, as you're working through other pages throughout the life of the campaign, update the alt text while you're at it.

If you're already updating the page title or content on a page, it's not that much extra effort to do the alt text while you're there.

Ok, that does make things a little different. Having genuinely organic links like this isn't really going to be a dangerous thing in this context. Since they really are legitimate, there will be a decent spread of anchor text, placement etc and you've already got thousands of relevant links as well.

Think of it like social media - Facebook and Twitter rank just fine for a number of things and they have billions of links from all over the Internet. My guess is that the current ranking issues are more related to onsite elements and perhaps the way users are interacting with your site.

There are quite a few pages that are very thin and thousands that offer 0 unique content.

The home page does a pretty good job of giving me the basics but if I were going to sign up, I'd want a little more information so perhaps this would be a good place to start. Create a page detailing each of those home page sections and how they're helpful to me.

If you do go down this route, make sure they're put somewhere handy in the nav. You don't want your important pages to be buried 5 clicks deep in the nav; push them as close to the top level as practical.

There are a number of other onsite elements that could be improved too, like H1s (most just say "What is twiends") and image alt text as some basic examples.

I hope that helps!

Interesting Giorgio, I hadn't seen that WBF before.

Absolutely no disrespect to Ruth but that's the first WBF I've disagreed with. The scraper risk is something I'm willing to take a gamble on for the benefits of relative links and the other points are moot if your website is setup correctly (htaccess deals with the potential for different versions of your domain and IMO canonicalization should always be used).

Going by that WBF, if your site is set up correctly with redirects and canonicalization, the only benefit here is if a scraper copies your site and there's a very slim chance of this actually happening.

Assuming pricing in your country (US?) is about the same as here in Aus, I'd probably do the following if I didn't have SEO knowledge myself.

• Use a few months worth of that budget upfront to get a quality company to do a thorough audit and devise a plan for me to work through
• Work through this plan as quickly as I humanly could without cutting corners
• Return to the original company periodically (quarterly?) for advice along the way so I know I'm always on track and not wasting my effort sprinting in the wrong direction
• Buy a few helpful tools to make analysis easier and monitor results. I'd say at least Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 items) and some kind of ranking tool - we use AWR Cloud.
• Engage a contractor of some form (Fiverr?) to start producing as much quality content as the remaining budget allows

Of course, if services are much like tangible products where Australia is 50-100% more expensive (the joys) then I'd probably just take the time to find and engage a quality agency and keep a close eye on their work to make sure you're getting value. Here in Aus the value you'll get from $1,000 /month is questionable unless you're in a vertical with minimal competition.

Before the hate starts - _some _agencies and certainly freelancers can do a fantastic job for you on that budget, it's simply that the smaller your budget, the higher the likelihood of landing a dud provider. Again, $1k /month in the US may be the standard minimum for quality agencies so this wouldn't apply.