Hmm, ok. So you'll be handling the .com which targets the UK and each other location will be responsible for their own optimisation?

That does make it somewhat more viable, provided they are actually going to optimise their respective sites and do it properly.

If not, there's still no real reason why all locations couldn't exist in subfolders for all the reasons I mentioned above.

As a working example of a large site covering multiple locations with this subfolder model, check out HP. Below are 2 different location "home pages" depending on where you are.

http://www8.hp.com/au/en/home.html
http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/home.html

Depending on your position in the company/team, if I were in your shoes I'd be pushing to have all locations run from the subfolder model and setting the international standard that other locations must abide by to keep it all uniform. ie Each page must use the same template including styling etc and cover the same information on their equivalent pages.

As an example, since artificial grass is your product, you might add content to your UK page that offers sections about general information, size and colour options, photos of the product and shipping information for the UK in that order.

You can then use that as a template that must be followed for /dk/, /uae/ etc. The aim here isn't to be a control freak but to maintain a certain standard of quality and continuity; the last thing you want is for any use who jumps from one location to another to feel as though they just arrived on a new website. Much like in the HP example, it's actually pretty hard to tell you're on a different subfolder until it comes to shipping or price information.

Also, I hope you don't mind but I had a 30 second skim over your website. While it's generally a pretty good site, it is a little too keyword-heavy and this isn't something you want to replicate across multiple subfolders.

Looking at the page title for the home page as an example, it's Artificial Grass Lawn, Astroturf, Fake Turf | Easigrass.

The fact that it starts with "Artificial Grass Lawn" is already a signal to users who see your site in the SERPs that it's probably quite spammy and should be avoided.

There are a few other similar elements on the site too, even the location page URLs:

http://www.easigrass.com/uk/glasgow-artificial-grass/

Just easigrass.com/uk/glasgow would be sufficient. Having 25+ pages with artificial-grass in the URL isn't ideal.

I also found 5x 404s and a bunch of internal links pointing to redirected pages. If you want to look into these, Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is a great option for that.

Also, from a user perspective I'm a little confused as to why there are locations under "Find Local Branch" and what seems to be a different set of locations under "Artificial Grass".

Rand actually just did a Whiteboard Friday that covers some of this if you'd like some more info

Hi Alex,

The answer depends on whether or not there are any valuable backlinks pointing to your .dk domain.

If the answer is no then there isn't really going to be any value in doing the redirect since there is no strength to pass. On the other hand, if it does have a strong backlink profile then yes, you could point it to the subdirectory.

As for splitting the subfolders out to their own domains, I'd recommend against doing this too. While it's true that you can offer more geo-specific signals by having each location hosted in their respective countries and on the correct TLD (.dk, .co.uk etc), it increases the amount of work exponentially.

If you split your single .com site into 5 different websites for example, that's now a total of 6 domains to plan, manage, produce unique content and build links for. It's great in theory but what usually ends up happening is people end up with 1 moderate site and 5 rubbish ones because they just don't have the resources to optimise them all!

Basically, unless you have a large pool of resources at your disposal, there isn't really any way that you can leverage that .dk domain to help your .com unless it has a good link profile.

What you can do to strengthen your .com is take a very close look at your .com's onsite elements and optimise them as well as you can (good nav structure, high quality content, fast page speed, compelling page titles and meta descriptions etc) then get to work building quality backlinks. Bonus points if you can earn some that point directly to the landing pages in each of those location subdirectories.

Canonicalization is a perfectly acceptable way to deal with this, particularly if you only have 3 or 4 of these pages.

On the other hand, if you have quite a few, I'd be more inclined to block them via Robots.txt to save some crawl budget.

For what you're looking to do here, the outcome is essentially the same, one just stops Google spending valuable resources crawling those pages unnecessarily.

For more info, there is some helpful discussion and further reading in this Q&A Post if you're interested.

Hi Hemantt,

It's difficult to say without having your domain name and I honestly don't know enough about how Moz generates their spam score metric to give you an accurate answer as to why you have a 5.

That said:

1.)How can we increase the page authority ? Building high quality backlinks will increase your page authority.

2.)Should i buy more backlinks ? Which website you will****recommend me ? This is an easy one: no. Buying backlinks is a great way to increase your spam score

3.) How can i reduce my spam score to 0 or 1 ? I'm not  sure about the links which are attached to my website? However, I read in moz article it could be because large domain and few links. It doesn't show any thing on open site explorer.

As I  mentioned, I'm not 100% sure this metric is generated but I'd expect that building high quality backlinks to your landing pages will lower this score. Having few links would give you low Page Authority and Domain Authority but I doubt it would increase your spam score unless you only had a handful of links and they were mostly bad.

Hi Alex,

There are a couple of misconceptions here that I'll explain in a moment but in short: doing this isn't going to help you

so in the browser it shows up as www.ourcompany.dk

Redirecting from one domain to another will actually take the user to that second domain rather than showing the second website but keeping the original URL. What I mean by this is if you redirect example.com to website.com then visit example.com, after a moment you'll see the URL change to website.com.

In your particular instance, directing www.ourcompany.dk to your .com domain would just take the user to the .com. Also, a redirected URL won't rank so you'd have to be driving traffic directly to the .dk site via social media or something for anyone to even hit that redirect.

The only time this would offer you any benefit would be if you had a great backlink profile on the .dk domain since you'd be transferring ~80-90% of that link strength.

There are options available to do what you're looking to (display the .dk address but the .com site) like iframes but both of these methods would also see your .dk site ignored by search engines since it would be a weak duplicate of your .com.

I hope that helps, let me know if I can clarify anything for you here

Absolutely! I was berated by a prospective client last year when I politely informed him that out content team don't write to keyword density these days and focus on the user experience instead.

His response: "I've heard enough; you should think about at least reading an SEO book if you're going to take people's money for it!" [slams down the phone]

Dodged a bullet!

My top five here:

1. Forced keyword placement. "You absolutely must get your exact-match keyword at the start of the page title."
2. Redundant pages for keyword targeting. "Create a page for each variation of your keyword(s) so you can rank for them all!"
3. **Content doesn't matter, as long as you have the keywords in there. **_"Nobody is going to read more than maybe 100 words so don't bother putting anything more than a paragraph or two on each page; Google is just looking for keywords" _
4. Content spinning on pages with a large volume of pages. _"Writing unique content for each page is a waste. Search engines are smart enough to read your content, the words just have to be moved around." _
5. Spending big money on exact match domains.

Seeing these is kind of amusing until you remember that some poor business owner paid hard-earned dollars for this outdated rubbish to be applied to their site.

Hi Jonathan,

Sitewide footer links on that many domains isn't really the best idea. Would these links serve any real purpose or is it just for the backlink strength?

If you were going to link from each one, I'd suggest keeping the volume very small and using them to add value. For example, rather than dumping them in the footer and masking most with a nofollow, point them to a great blog post on the global domain or at least say something like "interested to know more about [manufacturer brand]? Check out our global site to see where we're headed in 2016." You can include the link in that sentence so it makes sense in context.

Going somewhat off topic here, is there even a need to have 100+ websites for a single brand? More often than not, the better solution is to have a single powerhouse of a website rather large volumes of satellite sites scattered around the web. I imagine you're talking about sites like CarBrandLA.com, CarBrandNYC.com etc, rather than CarBrand.com CarBrand.com.au, CarBrand.co.uk? If it's the latter, these geo-specific TLDs make a bit more sense

Google hasn't updated public PageRank scores for quite some time and they even announced last month that it will be taken down completely.

What that means is any sites that went live after the last PageRank update would have shown a score of 0 and now, nobody can even see the old numbers.

Google does still use this metric internally, they just don't make that score public, partly because it's very broad and only one of many factors.

Here's another great article from Search Engine Land if you'd like to do some further reading on it. Hope that helps!

Hi Vahid,

Google goes to great lengths these days to understand what your website is about. It comes from a combination of elements, some of which include:

• Page titles
• Headings
• Content (keywords, relevant phrases and related topics etc)
• The relevance of backlinks and anchor text pointing to the site
• Relevance of image alt text

By considering each of these and likely quite a few more, search engines can put together quite an accurate picture of exactly what it is that you do and how relevant you are to both the larger terms and the more obscure long tail stuff.

To give you an example what I'm talking about, think about a care hire company here in Brisbane. If the page title and H1 for the home page are talking about car hire in Brisbane, the content covers things like car hire, rentals, vehicle information, location info for their various stores in suburbs etc and they've got backlinks from car and tourism websites, it's quite obvious that this website is all about car hire in Brisbane.

Alternatively, if that same website had no real connection between each of these onsite elements and backlinks from all over the place, they're not going to seem nearly as strong or relevant for their specific terms.

I suppose the short answer to your question is to provide users with good, relevant content, build relevant backlinks that will actually earn referral traffic and Google will work out your "category" from that.

I can't say I've come across this one before but I've just done some brief research and basically it appears to be a fake traffic website, as the name would suggest.

Sites like this work on a scheme where you visit sites in their list of "members" and this earns you credits. The more credits you earn this way, the more people can visit your site. Think of it like exchanging visits.

I've never used one of these myself but I'd imagine there will be certain criteria that must be met to earn the credits; maybe a certain time on page or performing an action so you're not generating a bounce.

A bit more info I found on a black hat forum:

"...easyhists4u is, alike others, website service, which will give you plenty of free and real traffic, however, to get the free traffic, if you don't wanna pay for it, you firstly need to earn credits and to earn credits, you need to browse other people's websites, then you earn credits and you can exchange those credits for a free traffic. It's simple and easy, but the catch is, you're trading your own free time for your traffic, which is kinda a deadend, because you need to spend like 1 hour to get enough credits for like 10 visitors to your page, which is kinda a joke, if you think about that."

As for the question of how this benefits you, real and engaged traffic has been proven to help your rankings in the short term. It stands to reason that continuing to pay for traffic every day would offer you continued improved rankings as a result of this traffic. I don't condone this sort of thing since it misses the true point of SEO and just focusses on SERP positions.

Finally, how your client was selected is one that I can only speculate on. I'd suggest it's either a previous SEO provider submitted them to this scheme so they could report "traffic growth" to the client. Alternatively, the owners of this site fake traffic site could randomly select domains to drop into their members list so that people do exactly what you've done here - notice them in the referral list and look closer at them.

All in all, I'd suggest contacting them and attempting to have the site removed from their list and adding them to the disavow file as well. It's unlikely you'll get a response from them but it's worth the 60 seconds it takes to send an email anyhow.

Fake traffic like this is painful because it completely messes with your stats and forces you to mess around with filters to exclude them as a referral source.

This is my understanding too, Laura. It has proven frustratingly difficult to find a definitive answer to this question!

Hi Edgar,

Dmytro is correct, these tools aren't 100% accurate, they're just used to give you an indication of volume and quality.

I suspect the main reason for this is the sheer volume of websites out there. To provide 100% accurate backlink data, they'd have to be crawling billions of pages every single day to detect new/lost links. It's not uncommon for a new link to take anywhere from a couple of days to 3 or 4 months to show up.

As a general rule, the more popular a site (think New York Times, not a high-traffic spam directory), the faster your link will be seen, though not necessarily.

Hey John,

The challenges we face are pretty typical of any email marketing campaign really. Email marketing is quite common these days so users have a far better understanding of the intent behind your emails and this in itself can make it quite tough.

Combine that with the incredible volume of emails the average person receives in a day and you're really fighting an uphill battle. The question becomes how you can stand out from the hundreds of other emails that day and give them a reason to click. The answer depends on the target market; clickbait works for some demographics while it just infuriates others.

If you can consistently demonstrate value to your users then the battle becomes a little easier. Looking at my work mailbox from the past week, the only 3 regular emails I've given more than a cursory glance are also 3 that I typically find to be valuable to me professionally while the others I'll usually skim the subject line as I go through deleting the large volumes of lazily templated stuff I receive regularly (the only reason I don't unsub from these is that occasionally I get something useful from them).

By way of example, these 3 quality ones that I've actually opened are from Moz, Backlinko and Google Webmasters. The last one is obvious, but for the Moz and Backlinko emails, they're never "selling" anything, their approach feels like much more of a "here's some information you probably want; read it or don't, your call" which I appreciate. No fear-mongering clickbait, just practical advice or helpful industry info.

As SEO Manager I don't have a whole lot of direct involvement with email marketing these days, though this is what I've found from both past and personal experience.

Hi Manas,

It's quite tough to give general advice on something like this because it often needs quite a specific answer, depending on your company name and that keyword you want to target.

If your company name is very close to that larger keyword, like Car Hirez and you're trying to rank for that branded term and Car Hire, it can be a little tricky. Without further info, my best suggestion would be to put that company name everywhere that it makes sense, and always in the same order.

I don't mean cram your company name whenever you can, just make sure it's in all the usual places like the page title, logo alt text, in your content, in all of your NAP listings, your link anchor profile etc. Keeping it to the same phrasing each time is also important for you to establish that those 2 or 3 words as your actual brand name, rather than words.

For example, don't allow alternation between ABC Car Hire, ABC Rental Cars, Car Hire from ABC etc. if the name is ABC Car Hire, make sure it's written that way wherever practical.

Of course, to rank for that broader term, the usual rules apply. Include that keyword in your page title, H1, content, internal link anchors etc etc. Treat the branded term and the keyword as separate items; that's how you want them to be viewed.

Hi Taylor,

That screenshot is interesting. My assumption would be that Google has seen this duplication and is simply disregarding the other versions of what it considers to be the same content.  The reason duplicate content isn't such a huge deal these days (it's not a good thing at all but it won't really get you penalised) is because Google is much better and dealing with it.

From my understanding, what you're seeing here is exactly the expectation - they determine which piece seems to be the most relevant and useful to searcher intent based on a number of things, then disregard the others. No point in indexing multiple versions of the same thing, right?

As for the smaller bits and pieces, I'll take a closer look at your site again once I'm back in the office this afternoon and let you know

Hey, thanks Matt!

I don't contribute for the points but the perks are certainly nice

Hi Meier,

I completely agree with Matt. In theory, you can get a better focus by having a separate domain for each location. In practice though, the amount of work required to do this just isn't worth it.

As Matt mentioned, you'll need to build 2 link profiles, write 2 sets of content (without them being duplicate!), manage and optimise 2 sites etc.

Just create and optimise a separate page for each location and make sure the site structure/nav makes sense.

Hi Alex,

Since you're talking about subdomains rather than separate domains and you mention "their style of food", it sounds like they're basically the same restaurant, just in different locations and owned by different family members?

If that's the case, having a separate landing page for each location is the way to go. This means you've only got one lot of content to write rather than 2 full websites and you only have to worry about building a single link profile as well.

You wouldn't even need different subfolders to separate these two, just a landing page for each. The menus are the same, the About Us page probably doesn't need to be any different and the Contact Us page can just offer details and/or a form for each on the one page. Really, the pages you'd need would probably look something like this:-

• Home page
• Location 1
• Location 2
• Menu
• Contact Us

You may want to create other pages on there of course but these would be your basics. If you went down the subfolder route and had a location, menu and contact page for each, that's just adding complexity and redundancy that you could do without. At the very least, the simplistic approach is going to help your crawl budget since engines won't be crawling 2 of everything.

Think of it a bit more like a franchise - present one brand on the site and have a landing page for the locations.

Hope that helps!

I would expect to. I can't say I've ever come across this question but we know Google doesn't really care if our headings are wrapped in a

tag these days, they just look at the styling so I would suppose this would be the same, just in reverse.

That said, it's kind of an awkward thing to do

There are a few bits and pieces that could be improved on the site but really, I think the biggest issue is going to be that amount of duplication.

Having a small volume or percentage of pages with identical content isn't going to kill your site, Even now, you're ranking #3... you're definitely not penalised, just seen as slightly lower quality now. Besides pricing, there doesn't really seem to be any need to have an entire subset of pages for each country since the only thing that seems to change is the price.

If it were my site, I'd be culling all the country code subdirectories and having the price generate dynamically based on the user's location. If you're in the US, show US pricing in USD, if you're in Australia then you get the Aus price in AUD etc.

It will give you fewer redundant pages to manage, less duplication and help out with your crawl budget efficiency as well.

Admittedly I've only checked from Australia, but your site speed could do with some improvement too

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/shwoodshop.com/A31MtKKC

Headings carry weight based on their formatting (font size, font weight etc) and location. Regardless of how you go about this, moving the heading down the page is going to steadily decrease that value from my understanding. For both users and search engines.

Moving it down a few lines is no big deal  but if you're moving it 1000px below the fold, it's a strange choice

Search engines will render your page, including CSS so they see it essentially the same way as the end user.

1) Analytics data is based on the UA code on the page. Assuming your pages are built on a template, by default the UA code for yyy.com is going to receive the visit, not yours. You could ask them to put your UA code on there but... that kind fo defeats the purpose of having analytics in the first place when you're blurring the data!

2) From a user perspective, it would be a little confusing to click a top nav link and end up on another website, so yeah I would suggest putting that link somewhere else on the site and making it clear that they're about to leave yours. Bonus points for using target="_blank" to open that other page in a new tab, also for user experience.

**3) **Right again. If yyy.com has nothing to do with xxx.com (as in the owners of X and Y don't even know each other) then it's a very strange request and one I'd be hesitant to even entertain.

The quality of their site can hurt you to a minor extent, I'd just be more worried about the confusing user experience and the fact that you'd be electively sending your users to their site, while they offer you... what?

The reason they want that link up there is simply the implied strength of that location. Link value is typically seen in order of priority from top left to bottom right; a link in your top nav gives them a sitewide link from almost the very top of every page. Good for them I suppose, though sitewide links aren't great, but not something you should do.

Either of these options is ok depending on the context, as Laura mentioned.

As always, if there's no real reason for both pages to exist then I'd suggest using a 301 to point that old page to the new one.

What your friend is talking about is actually a subdomain, not a subdirectory. If you had subdomains like sf.website.com and la.website.com then yes, they're be treated as separate entities. Subfolders aren't that much of a big deal.

That said, the simpler your site structure, the better. It's going to help your crawl budget and if you have the opportunity to simplify a site you plan to work on for years, why not spend a few hours doing it now and save yourself the heartache for years to come?

The short and generic answer is yes, it will lower the strength you're receiving from that site but it won't drop it to 1/20th.

More links is a good thing if those links make sense but the more you have, the less strength each of them carries; 20 links will not offer 20x the strength of 1 link, if that makes sense

Hi Marcel,

Internal linking between your blog posts is something you should definitely be doing, as long as they're relevant to each other. If one blog post is helpful to a user, linking to a related one may give them that bit of extra info they needed.

On the other hand, linking from your blogs to landing pages is something I'd avoid. Blogs are meant to be informative and/or starting a conversation. Linking to your products or services will often make the whole post feel like it was just written to promote what you do.

There are some exceptions to this but they are rare.

Also, don't get too tied up in using keywords as your anchor text. Just use whatever anchor makes sense and if it happens to have the keywords in there then that's great too.

Hi Dani,

As John mentioned, there are so many factors involved that it's very tough to accurately pinpoint the reasons why a site might start losing rankings.

To answer your question directly - no, there is no tipping point where your link profile just isn't strong enough to carry a certain volume of pages. There is a similar scenario that could happen but I'll get to that in a moment.

The other thing is that to my knowledge, the traffic data in Ahrefs isn't 100% accurate like Analytics, it's more of an estimation based on extrapolating a smaller pool of data. I'm not completely sure about this but that's my understanding. Basically, the drops you're seeing might not actually be as pronounced as the graph indicates.

So, the type of scenario where there are "too many pages" is moreso related to the user experience. If you're creating large volumes of pages just for "better SEO", you're going to have a bad time. If your site has 20 real pages and 80 pages just targeting a keyword then this is where you're like to start seeing a drop in your rankings as the overall quality signals on your site begin to dip.

Users don't enjoy keyword-heavy and redundant pages and the metrics will demonstrate this to search engines very quickly.

You should always be looking to improve the strength of your link profile, but if you're worried about creating too many pages, don't be. Create the pages that make sense for the user, provide a great user experience and you'll be fine.

They can be incredibly effective and in some instances a necessity. The problem with them is the number of potential issues that can see them quickly change intent from high quality, helpful pages to keyword-stuffed trash.

There are three major issues we come across here on a semi-regular basis and they come down to communication, though none of them are easy to resolve:

**"Our service is the same everywhere" **- Every now and then we get a client who insists that their product or service is exactly the same everywhere, even when we know for a fact that it isn't. This makes it incredibly hard to build effective local pages because all we can do is offer info on the generic differences of their vertical rather than the unique characteristics of this particular business.

"All the top ranking competitors are using the keyword constantly in their content; the fact that you haven't leads me to believe you don't know what you're doing" - We take the educational approach right from our original proposal all the way through but sometimes, there is a not-so-silent business partner or the owner's family member who "knows SEO" and claims that our lack of spam means we're a waste of money after a few weeks of a campaign. Fun!

**"We need a landing page for every combination of location and service" **4 services across 10 locations? We need 40 landing pages!!! Obviously, this is always an absolute "no".

Irritating as these things really are, the solution is always the same. Run through the project plan again, educate them on why we're going down this route, provide some external sources like Miriam's great post and encourage questioning. The vast majority of the time this gets everyone back on the same team and a productive, well-optimised site. Every now and then it means we simply don't work for that client anymore if they continue to insist on spam.

Miriam's guide on this echoes our internal thoughts and process almost exactly and the key message is to never create local landing pages if they have no business existing in the first place. A question we so often ask here: if Google didn't exist, would you still perform that task?

I agree with Eric here so I won't repeat what he has said, simply offer additional suggestions.

Firstly, you can click on each entry from that Crawl Errors window in your screenshot and from the window that pops up, check out the "Linked From" tab. It will show you all the pages this broken one has links from.

If you're having no joy finding them on the pages manually, you can try the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Crawl the site and if the 404s show up here (if they don't they probably don't exist anymore and you can mark them as "fixed" in Search Console) then click them and check out the "Linked From" tab at the bottom. This tool shows you not only the pages it's linked from but also the anchor text so you can go to the linking pages and use ctrl+f to find the offening link(s).

Hope that helps!

The others are right, you should be looking for another company to provide you with unique posts for both UX and search engine reasons.

I wouldn't expect that you'll find yourself with a penalty since it will look more like poorly managed syndication than anything else but at the same time, you're not going to get any value out of it.

The best ways to handle it would be to use one of the three methods (preferably rel=canonical) that tell search engines that your content came from one of the other sites it has been posted on but of course, doing this essentially says "this isn't my content, please give me no credit for it" which begs the question... why pay for it?

404s do hurt both user experience and ranking potential. As far as rankings go, it will hurt you site-wide too since it's an indication of your site's quality.

Releasing it without some products isn't the end of the world. The 404s will be a problem though - I would not recommend launching a website with any 404s, much less a collection of them.

If the links to these pages are just in the nav, it should be easy enough to comment those out temporarily so you don't see those 404s. What you end up with then is just a website that sells fewer products really.

Hi Bryan,

No offence taken by any of us, I'm sure. It's an unfortunate fact that our industry has a number of... dodgy providers.

In any case, our process is quite similar to Danny in that we use a 2 stage interview process and a test.

Ours is broken into 2 parts. A very short phone interview to cover the boring old cliche questions like "why did you leave your last job?" and " what are you looking for from this role?" I'll also throw in a bit of a qualifying question that could raise some obvious red flags so I can filter out the ones that just aren't going to work out. This saves my time and, more importantly, saves their time and travel costs. If they're out of work, the last thing they need is to be travelling to an interview they just aren't right for.

For those that make it past this step, they're invited in for a face to face interview. This one is about getting to know who they are; no technical questions. This gives me a solid indication of whether or not they'll be a good cultural fit for our team (very important to us here!) and if this seems fine, they're asked to complete a 10-question test which should take about  5 - 10 minutes.

It asks basic questions that anyone with the experience required for the role will almost roll their eyes at because it's so easy - "what is the purpose of a page title and where is the average user likely to see it most?" - that type of thing.

All of this lets me know what sort of technical ability they have, how well they can communicate, what sort of person they are, what they're looking to achieve and whether or not they can articulate answers to basic questions under a bit of pressure.

Then, if we end up with 2 candidates who seem evenly matched in every way, we arrange a Mortal Kombat style fight to the death.

Seriously though, being ecommerce, if you do go this route make sure you include specific questions about SEO for ecommerce. They can fall under a few different rules as far as how they should be set out, how to deal with potential content duplication etc.

Hi Jenifer,

This is an interesting one and I honestly can't figure out what's going on here. Could there be some section(s) of the site that have been obscured that maybe I can't see but Google is picking up?

There are quite a few problems I found in a quick skim of the HTML which might be the problem but honestly this is grasping at straws. It's something I would definitely recommend fixing for separate reasons. See if it makes any difference to this problem but I doubt it will.

An example of what I've noticed:

_widht="100%">

This report from W3C highlights a bunch of others, though not all of them. This report is mostly a red flag that the HTML could do with some attention to tidy up and get more functional._

Hi Jenifer,

Very hard to say without being able to take a look at the site. If you're comfortable dropping a link here I can take a closer look for you?

If you can browse to both without either of them redirecting then you've got duplicate pages. You can tell if they're redirecting because the address will change.

This is a handy resource from Google on exactly this topic

This isn't a huge deal but at the same time, it's not a difficult one to fix so you might as well.

Subfolder. A subdomain is viewed by search engines as a different website which means you're not getting the strength of your existing link profile.

Subdomains are great if you have sections of your site that you don't want/need to rank (think login.website.com or members.website.com) but if we're talking about a common example like blog.website.com vs website.com/blog, always the latter.

Exactly where they get it will depend on which tool you're using but if they haven't got your GA login info, it's probably pulling from something like SEMrush or a similar tool.

From my understanding, these tools use reasonably accurate extrapolation to give you those numbers. For example, if they have 1 million people with their toolbar installed and tracking their usage data, they can then make some educated assumptions and suggest that if you're getting X number of visits 1 million people, your actual numbers will be approximately Y, based on a complex algorithm to factor in certain elements, I'm sure.

Hi Alex,

There is certainly some merit in ranking for the more generic terms, it just depends on time/budget and the aim of their SEO.

If they're just looking to drive direct sales, the Vancouver terms are obviously going to be the way to go. If they want to grow their brand strength, spread their reach and ultimately become synonymous with the industry then going for the broader terms is a better option.

One is a low effort, low reward campaign while the other is the exact opposite - which one to choose becomes a business decision for them to make, really. That industry is a gold mine for great, educational content so developing a strategy for the broad terms would be a breeze, it will just be very time consuming to do right.

Interesting, I can't say I've seen that before.

Perhaps a silly question, but have you confirmed whatever tool you're looking at is showing you metrics for the subdomain rather than the default "root domain"? If not, you'll be presented with exactly what you're seeing here since the "root domain" metrics will display info for domain.com.

You're currently on the right track and for all the right reasons. As a user, I'd rather see the surgery rather than an individual doctor and as you mentioned, splitting your reviews across multiple doctors isn't ideal.

From your side of things, you're obviously better off having the doctor's surgery listed and having the potential to drive traffic to the website.

Another factor that I'm not 100% sure about is how the current situation of individual doctors being listed will play with Google guidelines.

Hi Ricky,

This one is always a tough question to answer. It depends on a number of factors, not least of which being your vertical but it will take some creative thinking for sure.\

Unfortunately it isn't something I can even give you broad suggestions on. The questions you need to answer are "who would want to see our services pages?" and once you're comfortable you've got the answer to that, ask "where would they find it helpful to stumble across this page?". It could be an industry-relevant website where your product is a great fit, maybe a relevant forum where someone is literally asking for what your page covers etc.

This is why it's so important to make all of your landing pages genuinely helpful - if the current answer to the first question is "nobody would want to see it, it's terrible" then that should be priority #1 Build something link-worthy and reach out to those niches.

Don't forget good old fashioned competitor link analysis here either. You may find nothing directly in their link profiles but it might spark an idea - I know it's happened to me plenty of times!

Hi Sarah,

I missed this notification on this one somehow!

To be honest, I don't have an answer for you on this one. Perhaps it might be worth either getting in touch with the Moz team or posting another question specifically tagged as "Product Support". They seem to be pretty good at answering those queries too

Hi Tyson,

You won't get penalised for having a website that isn't mobile-friendly, what you can expect to see though is poor(er) rankings for searches from a mobile device.

I've had a quick look at your site and the reason for your ranking drops is going to be far more to do with keyword spam and thin content than anything else.

Page Titles & Meta Descriptions For example, this page title for one of the invitations pages:

Wedding Invitations in Vaughan - Stephita Invitations Online, Toronto, Richmond Hill, Markham, Scarborough, Mississauga, Thornhill, Etobicoke, York, East York, Woodbridge, Vaughan, Concord, North York, Maple, New York, Barrie, Ajax, Pickering, Oakville, Newmarket, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal, Ontario, Canada, Handmade, Wedding Invitations, Thank-you Cards, Save the date, Menus, Programs, Placecards, Stationary, Stationery, Pocketfolds, Pocketfold, Trifold, Tri-fold, Trifolds, Tri-folds

The meta descriptions are very much the same. As a rough guide (length is based on pixels, not characters), page titles should be kept to a max of around 55 characters. The above is 501 characters, by comparison.

These guides are great resources for writing page titles and metas:

Page Titles
Meta Descriptions

Thin Content

The other major factor I noticed was thin content. Of the landing pages I opened, they seemed to have ~100 - 400 words which can be enough if done very well, but I typically suggest more like 1000+ words for your landing pages, making sure you answer all the common questions you users might have about each product. Make the content genuinely helpful for users rather than just telling them all about your business

404s (Broken Links)

There are a few broken links on the site, pointing to the following pages:

http://www.stephita.com/img/swatch/paper_japanese/268.jpg
http://www.stephita.com/img/swatch/paper_japanese/449.jpg
http://www.stephita.com/img/swatch/paper_japanese/460.jpg
http://www.stephita.com/img/swatch/ribbon/488.jpg
http://www.stephita.com/img/swatch/ribbon/489.jpg
http://www.stephita.com/img/swatch/ribbon/490.jpg
http://www.stephita.com/img/swatch/ribbon/644.jpg

The above are images that must have been either moved, removed or renamed. Each of them are referenced on the Swatches page.

Also, they're actually showing me a "soft 404" meaning rather than present me with a 404 page to suggest I clicked a broken link, it keeps that link in the address bar but shows me the home page. Very confusing from the user's perspective since it looks like they've gone to the page they tried clicking  yet it's identical to the home page (because it is the home page... kind of!) If you copy/paste one of the above links into your browser, you'll see what I mean.

302 Redirections

If a page is being permanently removed and you want to redirect traffic, strength and search engines to another, you should always use a 301 redirect (a 301 is a permanent redirect) rather than the current 302's (temporary redirect).

This is quite a minor detail compared to the other issues but something to mention anyhow.

Helpful Tools You'll find these tools handy in fixing these issues up and perhaps identifying more with a thorough look through everything.

Moz On-Page Grader - This one will give you a "grade" for your onsite optimisation and highlight potential issues. Screaming Frog SEO Spider - This too will crawl your site much like a search engine and show you a bunch of elements they can "see". It's great to see an overview of all the elements I've listed and so many more.

I know this isn't really what you were looking for but it is the answer I'm afraid. I hope you find it helpful!

Hi Steven,

To my understanding, Bing and Yahoo are essentially the same thing these days; they're the same engine, so that's good news

I'm always dubious of "complete list of ranking factors" type blog posts, but check out this post from Matthew Woodward. Beyond the intro, most of the top section is quite irrelevant to you here but scroll down and you'll find a bunch of great resources that might highlight something you can do to see you ranking better.

Fixing up that outdated sitemap is going to be a good idea either way. Hope that helps!

Hi Arnold,

That's a dangerous question to ask in an SEO forum but also a testament to the quality of the Moz community - ask that question on somewhere like Reddit and wait for the 1,000 self-promotional marketing spiels you get in the first 5 minutes!

To answer your question though, Moz does offer a Recommended List of SEO Consultants which is worth checking out. Most of us here do what you're looking for, it's just in poor taste (in my opinion anyway) to go looking for work in what is essentially a help forum.

It's a very common approach for franchises to take. As a matter of fact, we recently stopped work for a franchisee client because the franchisor decided to do exactly this and consolidate.

In terms of how to approach the topic with them, there are so many reasons why this is a great idea for everyone involved so taking the educational route can make a very clear business case as to why they should.

The biggest complication is that if the individual sites are locked into contracts with their respective SEO providers. Since it would take a little time there would be no issue with running a landing page on your main site and their satellite site simultaneously for that time with an understanding that they take their site down at a certain point.

It is considered duplicate. It isn't a huge deal if it's only a portion of the page, the bigger issue is that it will be essentially ignored on all but one of those pages - think of that section like a black spot that search engines won't "see".

If it makes up the majority of your content on these pages you're going to have a bad time, but if it's just a small section amongst quality content I wouldn't be too worried from a ranking perspective.

Having said that, a better way to deal with this type of situation is to have a separate page that talks about how your product/service works rather than duplicating the same bit of content page after page. It lets you go into more detail since anyone reading it obviously wants to know all about it, and it means much easier editing if this process ever changes, too.

Something else to consider is that, admittedly with very little info to work with here, it sounds like your content may be falling into the common trap of telling users what you want them to know rather than offering the info they're looking for. For most users, exactly how your process works may be of 0 importance to them until they're comfortable with what you have to offer, at which point an "our process" type of page is perfect for their next step; "this sounds great, but do they provide xyz with it as well?".

If this is correct for your users, that's even more reason to avoid duplicating this same bit of content on these pages - you'd be taking on the risks of content duplication for the sake of presenting users with info they may not care about at this stage of the buying process.

If a separate page for this isn't an option for some reason, you might find Rand's WBF on essentially the same topic to be a helpful explanation. I know he's talking about duplication of external content but the concept is the same.

This thought process is heading down a path I recommend against, so my initial response still stands. What you're talking about doing here is essentially just SERP manipulation rather than providing a good website that ranks because it deserves to.

Your idea will probably work if done correctly, the trouble is that doing it correctly takes as much (if not more) effort than quality tactics that are above board.

The biggest issue I see is that to have each of these sites and content pieces ranking of their own accord, you need search engines to see them as different entities. To rank for your own branded terms in their respective locations, you also need search engines to understand that each of these sites is your brand. Basically, you need to show that the sites are both different and the same brand simultaneously.

Making them appear separate will take the same black hat stuff as running a PBN these days - host them on different servers, have the registration info either obscured or different on each site, don't inter-link between them etc. Your aim is to make them all appear to be different sites, owned and run by different people.

As for having the content unique enough to actually appear unique, having the same person write multiple versions of the same article isn't going to go very well unless they're well trained in doing this stuff. The writer is going to use similar sentence structures and phrasing no matter how much effort they put into it and this combined with the same branding and identical topic are probably more than enough flags to highlight what you're doing.

If you want it to work, do as much as you can to make them look completely different, including different writers. Just plan it out beforehand and consider the time investment here and whether or not that time could be used more effectively.

Hi Jacob,

The answer really just depends on why the pages exist in the first place. If they're not serving a legitimate purpose then absolutely delete them.

If they are legit pages that you'd like to rank (e.g. individual product pages on an ecommerce site) then maybe take a look at why they don't rank in the first place. Load speed? Site/nav structure? Internal linking? Blocked in robots.txt? Not in the sitemap? Maybe no unique content? There could be plenty of reasons.

The only thing to double-check before you delete them is whether or not there are any good backlinks pointing to any of those pages. If there are good ones, either contact the site and ask them to update the link, or 301 it to a relevant page.