Hi Ricky,

More often than not, when we see this from a new-to-us client, it's because their previous SEO provider put some content on their homepage and drove 100% of the links there but did nothing for the other landing pages.

If you're comfortable dropping your URL in here I'd be happy to take a closer look, but if this is the case for your site, I'd suggest starting by boosting the content on each of your landing pages (to give you an idea, our internal expectation is 1500+ words of quality content per landing page, styled so it isn't a wall of text) and revise your upage titles, meta descriptions and headings as well.

Working on building some links to these pages will also help out quite a bit. Basically, the common  mistake is to almost over-optimise the home page, ignore the rest and wonder why it's only the home page that ranks

Similarly, make sure your nav is as flat as possible and links directly to these landing pages rather than just from a broader "services" page or something.

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.

Naturally in the perfect world, meaningful attributes should be added. Assuming you're a mere mortal with a limited number of hours in the day... the best short-term solution to this is going to be having the alt attribute applied but empty.

To my knowledge (happy to be pointed towards data showing otherwise), there's no real ranking difference between these two options. The reason I prefer to add a blank alt in this instance is because assistive technology (like screen readers for vision impaired users) are going to have a much better experience on your site this way.

If you have a blank alt, the screen readers will essentially ignore the image since they're going to read " ". On the other hand, if you don't have an alt attribute in the , it's going to read the source instead. Even a short img src is going to be cumbersome, especially if you have an image-heavy site!

You're very welcome. Either way I'd be interested to see how this one progresses.

Whether or not this is an issue kind of depends on what your product or service is. If you provide a local-only service like a restaurant then your US site ranking in the UK would be unusual.

On the other hand, if you sell a physical product this may not be so unusual. For example, here in Australia we're quite limited when it comes to finding men's online clothing stores, most of it comes from the US or the UK so it's not uncommon to see something like the US Jackthreads show up in the SERPs here.

Since you do have separate domains for each location, this might be an indication that search engines aren't really understanding the different jurisdictions for each site; maybe they're not geo-targeted enough for the algorithm to comprehend the fact that each of the 3 sites server a unique area.

Some of the elements that can help define this, in no particular order:

• Server location
• HTML language ( e.g. lang="en-US")
• Regional language differences (e.g. US spelling vs UK)
• Location markup - on your location pages at the very least
• Location mentions throughout your content

While not specifically on-topic, Rand's Whiteboard Friday about scaling geo-targeting offers plenty of great advice that can be applied here as well.

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.

Hi David,

Sounds like you're on the right track there which is great, though it's often better to fix the problem rather than mask it with de-indexing. Even something like giving people an opportunity to write a bio about themselves could be a great way to get some unique content on these otherwise-empty pages as a quick example.

I have seen a correlation between bounce rate and rankings. This doesn't necessarily mean causation of course but whether it's because of that bounce rate or the reason__s people are bouncing less, the ranking result is going to be the same

Moz also covered this topic back in August too.

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!

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!

Hi Dave,

I'm not 100% sure I understand the issue here. Do you mean users set up a profile on your website then link to that profile from their site? Kind of like if I put a link on our site to my Moz profile?