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Good news for you - this can all be cleared up simply.

Not Provided is Google saying we are not showing you the keyword data (from organic). There is a filter for a workaround. You'll never know the "exact keywords from organic" that are Not Provided. However, you can filter that data to tell you what pages they're going to. And if you know the page they're going to, it's highly likely that you know the target keyword for that page. So your Not Provided data could actually be those targeted keywords you mentioned.

The filter:

Filter type: custom - Advanced

Field A -> Extract A: Set to Campaign Term: (.not provided.)

Field B -> Extract B: Set to Request URL: (.*)

Output to -> Constructor: Set to Campagin Term: np - $B1

Check field A, field B, and override output field. (leave case sensitive unchecked).

Basically, this filter says "for not provided" - tell me the URL that users are going to. And from there, you can do some digging and determine what keywords are working. Also, this will affect future data, not past data.

I hope this helps.

Cole

Yes and Yes. Lol. I agree it can be quite confusing.

Glad I could help!

Cole

They don't do the same thing. Google Places is for maps listings (often referred to as local listings). Google Plus is a social platform.

If you have reviews on your old Google Plus page, I would see about possibly moving them over. Why? So they show up under your Places account to be rated (get 5 reviews and you become rated). Getting rated gets you the stars which means you're awesome, right?

I would reach out to Google via "Contact Us." It may take several days for Google to get back with you. I'm not 100% sure if reviews are transferrable. If not, then ask what Google recommends.

I hope this helps.

Hello,

It may be helpful to hire two separate companies - one focused on small business SEO and the other focused on small business web design. I've seen people in my local town do this and it turns out well.

I work for a US small company that caters to small business owners in both web design and SEO. I would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have here.

Thanks,

Cole

This is more of a business question. I would ask a few questions:

1.) Do these pages rank, possibly bringing traffic to your website?

2.) Do you want to keep these blog posts?

Yes, you would have to create the posts and 301 redirect them. However, do you want to keep this content?

If it was me, I would want the content to be moved over for a few reasons: it may be helpful for the user, it may be interesting / funny to read, it may bring traffic, or several other reasons that could be thought of.

I hope this helps.

Cole

You'll create a Google Places (Business) page. It will automatically creates a Google Plus page.

Update both fully with information. Now reviews will by synced to both (send them to Google Plus to leave reviews).

For duplicates, manage other Google Plus pages -> settings -> delete page. Keep the Google Plus page that is linked to Google Places.

I hope this helps!

Cole

I had a website that disappeared from the search rankings one morning, then a couple hours later it re-appeared. No manual actions were taken.

IF you had a website disappearing today (or yesterday possibly), it could be a Penguin 3.0 penalty as it was released within the past 24 hours.

Thanks,

Cole

Thanks so much to all who responded.

Robert, your post was very insightful in how I approach businesses.

Hey Pixel,

Nice name (I work for a company called Pixelbrush).

Are there documented articles or information out there on specific directories that Google does think is spammy?

Have you ever used directories to link to deep pages? For example, I would already use these directories to link to the home page.

Thanks,

Instead of the home page, have you ever done (domain)/page-1 for the URL in directories? I figured this would be a good way to build some page authority up for deeper pages for small businesses that can't seem to garner any attention with content / links.

BTW, these directories are not considered spam directories.

Thanks,

Cole

Hey Nick,

I hope my post is insightful, not demeaning.

You appear to have a specific (really low) CPA in mind while wanting 50 (high amount) leads a day. Without knowing your industry or target keywords, it's hard to comment on volume (leads) and CPA.

However, If you can generate 50 leads a day with certain keywords in PPC campaigns, then other people can too. If other people can, it drives up the price of your CPA. Thus, a low CPA and high number of leads is typically not reasonable.

I applaud you for tracking CPA and desiring a lot of leads. If you want 50 leads, assuming a 1% Click Through Rate and a 2% conversion on the clicks, you would need 2,500 clicks PER DAY and 250,000 impressions PER DAY. These are rough, industry standards but I hope this is insightful for what you're asking.

PS, Google doesn't call people trying to sale them. I second what Bruce said.

Thanks,

It appears the disavow tool dropped me out of the rankings. And I deleted in and appeared to be right back in the rankings.

Thanks,

Bruce,

We were #1 on local Google Places. Everything is linked up and running fine. We've been #1 for quite some time so it can't be that.

I've totally deleted the disavow file. Should I request a recrawl of our home page?

Thanks,

Sorry, this has been worked out.

I agree with Andy on this one.

Something else to think about is people want to talk to a decision maker. Well, an agency is not the decision maker at the company. At times when this is relevant, it helps to have a @mycompanydomain.com email address as to be taken seriously.

Thanks,

Honestly, I don't think anyone can respond to that because it depends on your experience, talent, and what you think is fair.

Thanks,

Thanks Erica!

Sounds like I want to move forward with Moz Local for most of our customers.

Awesome feedback.

Can you let me take a look at it? Feel free to private message me.

Thanks,

Gotcha. You solely focus on Moz Local.

Does anyone use any other service besides Moz Local?

Thanks,

For brands that have a budget to pay $600 / year for valuable backlink directories, would you recommend Moz Local + Yext?

I would like to hear some feedback on marketers that use Yext.

Thanks,
Cole

"you don't want to go changing your page titles frequently"

Very good thought too Andy!

Hi,

If you're changing the Page Title to represent an accurate keyword for that page (or what that page is about), then I would suggest actually changing the URL (or in this case allowing the URL) to represent that targeted keyword.

For example, I have a page about an alzheimer's game for people diagnosed with alzheimer's. My page title will be "Fun Alzheimer's Game for Loving Family Members with Alzheimer's." My URL may be "fun-alzheimers-game-for-family-members.  (something along those lines - I am creating something here that may not be accurate of course).

So you would want your URL and Title Tag to be not necessarily be exactly the same (although plenty of mine are) but very, very similar to tell search engines what this page is about.

Keep in mind that if you do change the URL (from changing the Title Tag), to do a 301 redirect. That is to tell search engines that the old URL now is this new URL.

I hope this helps.

Cole

So you have old URLs; have they been changed already?

I'm assuming not since you're getting great traffic from organic. If that's the case, why change them? There appears to be no problem unless I'm missing something (assuming you haven't changed the URL).

This may be a question for developers that have more knowledge.

Thanks!

That's really unfortunate that you can't get access to the landing page to determine keywords / content.

But yeah, I'd go with Google Places for Business and fill out all the information and get 5 reviews to become rated with the goal of being at the top of Local Search Results. In my experience, you'll have to ask 20-25 people that you have done business with to get 5 reviews.

Good luck!

robots.txt:

Disallow:

/wp-admin/

/wp-content/plugins/

Then, deindex them as mentioned in the first response.

Let me make sure I understand your question. You have migrated several (old) URLs into one (new) URL.

I would simply 301 redirect any old URL to a new URL that relates. For example, example.com/product-a-123-xyz.html is 301 redirected to example.com/product-a

You don't have to worry about what articles, bookmarks, etc. have the wrong URL because they are now redirected to the correct URL to maintain link value.

Do not 301 redirect page A to Page B that does not relate.

If you have any other 404s that come up via GWT or Moz and you have a relevant page for that 404, then go ahead and place a 301 redirect in. I would monitor this weekly (every Monday for example). It shouldn't be more than 20-30 to go through at most and that way you continue monitoring link value.

Does this answer your question? I hope this helps.

I'd be interested to know this as well. As far as local SEO, see my other posts on your other question.

Thanks and look forward to seeing responses

You can still do Google Places for Business and build reviews.

Often times the parent company will give you a subdomain, I'd try that. Or they have a page within the website dedicated to that location. There's several options here. I'd communicate to the parent company.

As far as link building, ideally you would want to send links to the subdomain (assuming they will give you one).

Thanks all.

Hey Tom,

The keywords we are competing for aren't very competitive.

Two follow up questions:

1.) To what length should we change the content? For example, is it a matter of a few words (location based) or is it more of altering each content on the page. I guess my question deals with the scope of the content change.

2.) Is there a way to let Google know we own all the websites? I had href lang in mind here. This may not be possible; I just wanted to ask.

Tom, thanks so much for your help.

Cole

Hello Moz Community,

I am doing work for a company and they have multiple locations.

For example, examplenewyork.com, examplesanfrancisco.com, etc.

They also have the same content on certain pages within each website.

For example, examplenewyork.com/page-a    has the same content as examplesanfrancisco.com/page-a

Does this duplicate content negatively impact us? Or could we rank for each page within each location parameter (for example, people in new york search page-a would see our web page and people in san fran search page-a would see our web page)?

I hope this is clear.

Thanks,

Cole

"I'm reducing duplicate content " - Google cannot crawl PDFs, but they do index them and show them in search results.

So let me ask you - why do you not want them indexed?

I say let them be indexed.

Cole

Is that it?

The same article will rank it two different geographic locations and duplicate content won't hurt me?

I feel like that's too easy. Maybe I'm overthinking it.

Thanks!

Hey Moz,

I am looking to target international audiences. But I may have duplicate content. For example, I have article 123 on each domain listed below. Will each content rank separately (in US and UK and Canada) because of the domain?

The idea is to rank well in several different countries. But should I never have an article duplicated? Should we start from ground up creating articles per country? Some articles may apply to both! I guess this whole duplicate content thing is quite confusing to me.

I understand that I can submit to GWT and do geographic location and add rel=alternate tag but will that allow all of them to rank separately?

www.example.com

www.example.co.uk

www.example.ca

Please help and thanks so much!

Cole

Your robots.txt looks good. Check your Webmaster Tools for any link domains that are spammy (such as links4you.com). It's possible you got a penalty. Are you just now noticing because you looked at Google Analytics today?

It's possible this is a link penalty. However, the only suspect linking domain I see is: http://www.cannylink.com/ - the sole purpose of that website is just for links. That is not valuable. I suggest that you look closer (I looked for 2 minutes) and see if there are any other spammy linking domains.

To remove these spammy linking domains: use the Google Disavow Tool within Webmaster Tools.

I hope this helps.

Cole

Hey Martijn,

I suppose that would be an alternative - I've never counted someone as an event personally.

However, the goal of this is to have an accurate percentage of people that are not engaged. This would be applied to all pages (assuming you have many pages or articles). I'm not familiar if the events "tip" would be applied to all pages. Can you explain the event tracking on specific interactions? Keep in mind this is for all pages / posts / articles, manually adding event tracking (if that's the case) is inefficient.

Here is a link to an article that I found helpful: http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/adjusted-bounce-rate-in-google-analytics/

Thanks,

Cole

I use dashboards for weekly / monthly reports showing basic data such as: users, bounce rate, locations, conversions, avg time spent on site, top pages, browsers, device, etc.

My favorite trick is the (Not Provided) filter I implement under Acquisition -> Channels -> Organic Search. So, people can see what pages (which you can determine keywords from that page) are bringing in the most traffic.

I like implementing a small code within the GA script to say "if user spends x amount of time on page, then it doesn't count as a bounce rate" - because the goal of the bounce rate is to show who isn't engaged. But if you visit one page, you could be highly engaged and leave.

Those are my favorites!

Moving a site is always a valid concern, double check your redirects (both pages and media - such as images and pdfs) and double check your on-site optimization.

Hope this helps.

Hello Alan,

Within Google Analytics, you can create a goal based on how long a user spends on the specific page. I think this is your best bet - I haven't heard of a plugin to assign a conversion when filling out the form.

Hope this helps.

Travis, thanks for the grind. I'll look into it.

Hello Moz community,

I have a popular news website that we are looking to target multiple countries (all English first).

So I know (1) a hosting provided (ip address) in that country and (2) a target extension (.co.uk) will help us. Am I missing anything else that can help when targeting international markets?

What I'm struggling with is the duplicate content. I can't copy the content over to the extension because of the bad practice of duplicate content.

Is it possible to have the same content on both websites and let Google know that it lives at the .com extension? If so, would those websites containing duplicate content still rank?

And we would want to target different languages later (for example Spanish). This would be different content because it is in a different language, correct?

Thanks for your help Moz community!

Cole

Awesome responses guys. Anyone else have any other insight?

Excellent, quality response. Thanks so much.

I would love to hear from any disavow experts, maybe even costs of them (of course, I don't want to break any Moz rules that may be applicable).

Cole

Hey Moz,

I am working with a client on more advanced SEO tactics. This client has a reputable domain authority of 67 and 50,000+ backlinks.

We're wanting to continue SEO efforts and stay on top of any bad backlinks that may arise.

Would it be worth asking websites (below 20 domain authority) to remove our links? Then, use the disavow tool if they do not respond.

Is this a common SEO practice for continued advanced efforts? Also, what would your domain authority benchmark be? I used 20 just as an example.

Thanks so much for your help.

Cole

Hey Ruben,

I've done some work for a couple title companies. If you Google "title lawyers lafayette la" or "title attorneys lafayette la," we rank #1. HOWEVER, our client has not seen a big jump of incoming customers from the website. In addition, we have recently added on local SEO (Google Places for business).

I've seen local SEO (Google Places for business) have tremendous success with a local criminal lawyer in town.

Conclusion: Local SEO may be more valuable than attempting to rank #1 on Google, but it is important to remember that your Local SEO (Google Places) is affected by your organic SEO as one of many factors.

I suggest: Having A+ on-site optimization (URL's, Title, Meta Description, Content with focused keywords, h1-h3 headers, image alt tags). And pursuing Local SEO via Google Places. Make sure to fill out all of the information within the account and I hope you achieve first page of Google Maps on SERPs.

Other marketing efforts: We have seen success from doing Facebook Ads targeting the real estate companies in town (custom audiences would be great too). We have also seen good success in Remarketing. Considering the title industry is a top-of-mind game.

Good luck!

Hey all,

I do SEO. I'm currently working with another SEO firm on a project.

The lady mentioned to me that Google recently updated (couple months ago) and changed their font causing them to lower the meta description to 55 characters.

Is this true? I have not heard of this.

Could she be confusing the meta description with the title tag?

I didn't know Google could have even update the Title tag too.

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the response.

I do not see any solutions here to be honest other than write the content over again.

Considering Google takes your IP Address location into consideration when you search a term such as "hospitals," I want each location to be able to rank for our list of target keywords. Thus, the rel=canonical may not be an option at this point.

Can anyone else comment on the ranking of pages (with duplicate content)?

Thanks again.

Cole

Hey Moz community,

Thanks for taking time to answer my question.

I'm working directly with a hospital that has several locations across the country. They've copied the same content over to each of their websites. Could I point the search engines back to a singular location (URL) using the rel=canonical tag?

In addition, does the rel=canonical tag affect the search engine rankings of the URLs (about 13 of them) that use the rel=canonical tag?

If I'm on track, is there an ideal URL (location) to decide has the original content?

This is actually the first time I've ever needed to use rel=canonical (if applicable).

Thanks so much.

Cole