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Hi Miriam,

I'm sorry to hear that phone trees are an issue for you, as well. Yes, other than the hope of temporarily disconnecting the phone tree, our only other option that we have found is to set up an @domain email and work with a site's support with that added authority. I hope that your teammates have some additional suggestions; looking forward to your response!

Jack

We have several clients whose practices have phone trees enabled for their primary number, which means we aren't able to send automated verification calls for Google, Yelp, ExpressUpdate (Infogroup), YellowPages, etc. Sometimes our clients are able to temporarily disable their phone trees, and sometimes said site's support teams manually verify for us once we have proven our association with the businesses. We just wanted to reach out to see if anyone had alternative solutions or workarounds, since phone trees usually cause a significant hangup. Thanks!

Totally agree with Jared.

If you're only selling one product, it doesn't make sense from a user perspective to have a different page for each keyword variation. Google is smart enough to figure this out. Just use those variations naturally on one juicy page describing all the features and benefits of the product.

If you want to go into more detail about a specific feature or benefit of the product, there's your opportunity to create a new page. Catch a prospective customer at an earlier stage in the sales funnel. Maybe they don't know about Digital Imaging Software. Maybe they just have a problem, and they're searching for a solution. Your subpages could target those more specific search queries.

Check out this post from Matt Gratt for ideas for expanding your keyword research.

I don't see any problem with your approach. By combining all of these resources into one blog post, you're essentially curating content from your own site.

As long as the post provides unique value to the user, then you're golden. In my mind, the value comes with packaging all these different resources into one post, making it easier for the reader to find all the info they need.

I would recommend rewriting the content with this angle in mind. And like Michael said, link to the old blog posts as a way of expanding on certain topics.

Ditto. Thanks for the info, Dirk!

Thanks for pointing me to the other Q&A, Donna.

We've tried most the techniques described in the thread. But I still haven't tried to segment the traffic based on valid hostnames. That sounds like a more efficient way to do it.

It will probably still be time-intensive with 2,500+ sites, but I don't know of any other way. I'm hoping that will take care of a good chunk of the spam referrals.

Thanks again!

Hello, everyone -

I'm looking for guidance on how to block or filter referral spam in Google Analytics. But I'm needing to block for an entire network of Wordpress websites. We have two networks which total over 2,500 websites. We are currently blocking sites we find out about via htaccess. This works, but only after we see we are getting hit with the spam. Updating 2,500+ Google Analytics accounts with filtering is not an ideal option due to the time factor and the fact that new bots coming out almost daily. We can continue the htaccess method, but does anyone have any other ideas for blocking referral spam for a large network of sites? These are the other ideas we have.

1. Blocking all traffic from Russia and China based up subnets. We know many will still get through, but it should block 50% of it, we hope.
2. Moving sites to Google Tag manager.  This is a huge tasks but we have seen that sites using Tag Manager are not effected, at least for now.

Other ideas are appreciated!

Thank you for the response, Miriam, that's very helpful!

Hey everyone,

Over the last few weeks Yahoo Local's Basic Listings have been failing left and right for me. When working to verify a business listing, I have been trying the phone, snail mail and email verifications specifically, and am 100% sure I've been inputting the correct code, yet no matter how many attempts I make, I get the following error:

http://i.imgur.com/pJ7ggBx.jpg

This is for multiple accounts, not just a single instance. Seems Yahoo's just got an unfixed, prevalent bug. I've reached out to their Support for information, but they have been unresponsive.

Anyone else running into this issue?

This is great! Thank you, Miriam.

Hey Miriam,

The problem is for both Google+ for Business and in Google's Places for Business dashboard. The duplicate listings aren't showing up in the SERPs, because Google is deactivating one of the "duplicates."

So, let's say I claimed an unverified Google+ for Business page for A Generic Business. I verify the page, fill out all the info, add photos, etc. and it's live and listed on Google and looks splendid. All the info is correct, confirmed, etc.

Then, say, a week later, I log into my account and there's a red banner across the top of my Google+ for Business dashboard saying that my listing has been marked as a duplicate. A duplicate of what? As always, I searched and only found one, unclaimed listing and that's what I moved into my account and verified.

I called Google and asked what happened, and they said they're doing a "cleanse," in which they're looking over both Google Places for Business listings and Google+ for Business pages and making "automated adjustments."

I've had multiple clients' business pages marked with this red banner, because Google generated and automatically verified a true duplicate of what it thought the page should look like, and then just pushed my listing out.

I hope this explanation helps make a bit more sense.

Hey Eduardo,

The problem is for both Google+ for Business and in Google's Places for Business dashboard. The duplicate listings aren't showing up in the SERPs, because Google is deactivating one of the "duplicates."

So, let's say I claimed an unverified Google+ for Business page for A Generic Business. I verify the page, fill out all the info, add photos, etc. and it's live and listed on Google and looks splendid. All the info is correct, confirmed, etc.

Then, say, a week later, I log into my account and there's a red banner across the top of my Google+ for Business dashboard saying that my listing has been marked as a duplicate. A duplicate of what? As always, I searched and only found one, unclaimed listing and that's what I moved into my account and verified.

I called Google and asked what happened, and they said they're doing a "cleanse," in which they're looking over both Google Places for Business listings and Google+ for Business pages and making "automated adjustments."

I've had multiple clients' business pages marked with this red banner, because Google generated and automatically verified a true duplicate of what it thought the page should look like, and then just pushed my listing out.

I hope this explanation helps make a bit more sense.

Was on the phone with Google Support about duplicate, verified pages showing up and they said they're doing a "cleanse" in which an automated system is reviewing existing listings and making decisions as to how those look, which often results in a new page that Google then automatically verifies.

Their Support phone system has been bogged down with people calling in, but I'm not seeing anything when I search about this issue.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

I agree with Chris - it's definitely old school and can look a little spammy, especially if it is overused or calls attention to a somewhat unnatural use of a keyword.

That being said, I don't think bolding a keyword will incur a penalty from Google. If emphasizing the keyword provides some kind of value to a user, than you should definitely consider using it.

Interesting. That may be a better option than Google Voice. Less expensive to setup a new phone number when the old one runs out. Thank you!

You could add a rel=canonical tag to each duplicate page that points to the "parent" product page. The downside of doing this is that Google will probably not index the duplicate pages in search. This would definitely be better than eliminating the pages completely though.

Thanks! I'll give that a try.

You know how, when you setup a Gmail account, Google asks you for a phone number to verify the account?

I've run into a problem where Google is not letting me create anymore accounts with the same phone number. I set up an account for every new client we take on so that we have complete control of the inbox for verification purposes.

Is there a way to get around this verification issue? We tried an app called Burner Phone but found out Google won't call the number because it's not supported by any major providers (e.g. Verizon, AT&T, etc.).

Any suggestions? Thanks for your help!

One additional point you could make to attract participants is that writing about their area of expertise can actually make them more of an expert.

Only when we write do we really solidify our thoughts and opinions. By contributing articles, you not only "show your expertise," you grow your expertise.

Hope this helps!

The traffic is starting to drop off... Weird. Thanks for your input!

The traffic is definitely coming from different cities in the area. It's actually pretty evenly spread. Browsers and operating systems are mostly the same with only a few variations.

I've noticed that a couple of my clients in the insurance industry have been receiving a pretty large boost in Referral Traffic from a source called click2.scour.com and click2.efacts.com. What surprises me most is that the traffic has a low Bounce Rate, a high Avg. Visit Duration, and is made up of 100% New Visits.

What is this? Why would they be getting so much traffic from these two sources all of a sudden?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I work with a lot of clients in the insurance industry. For many of them, local results are their best chance for showing up on page one of search results for these competitive keywords. I've been looking at signing them up for enhanced Localeze accounts to help increase their structured citations. Is Localeze an effective solutions for claiming structured citations, or is manually claiming listings more effective?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I work with a number of independent insurance agencies across the United States. All of these agencies have setup their websites through one preferred insurance provider.

The websites are customizable to a point, but the content for the entire website is mostly the same. Therefore, literally hundreds of agency sites have essentially the same content. The only thing that changes is a few "wildcards" in the copy where the agency fills in their city, state, services areas, company history, etc.

My questions is: will this syndicated content hurt their ranking potential? I've been toying with the idea of further editing the content to make it more unique to an agency, but I would hate to waste a lot of hours doing this if it won't help anything. Would you expect this approach to be beneficial or a waste of time?

Thank you for your help!

Thanks, EGOL. This is an approach I have been using, so I'm relieved to have it verified by another professional. I've been focusing on claiming listings, keeping them consistent, and linking back to the website. Hopefully, this will benefit my clients in the long run.

I work with a lot of small, independent insurance agencies and have found through keyword research that most people search for insurance by state (e.g. pennsylvania auto insurance) or simple by product (e.g. auto insurance). Only if an agency is located in a densely populated city like San Francisco do I see people searching for insurance by city. As you can probably guess, these keywords are extremely competitive. Big companies like Geico and Progressive tend to take over page one for these searches.

So, if I'm trying to optimize a website for an insurance agency in Quakertown, PA, for example, a small town with very few monthly searches (zero according to Google's keyword tool), how should I focus my on-page SEO efforts? Should I focus on "state + insurance," "city + insurance," or a combination of both? Or am I approaching this all wrong?

Thank you in advance for your help. I'm feeling really stumped and would appreciate any fresh perspective.