It's a personal choice but I don't see any harm in leaving it activated. I think there's more of a risk that tables will get corrupted if you are periodically deactivating and reactivating but that's just my opinion. If it's a concern, you would be better off posing your question to the plugin author.

Dreamrealemedia,

Use the Enable Media Replace plugin by Måns Jonasson. It will swap out the old image for the new, update all your links, and you'll be good to go. No 404 errors.

I agree with Alick,

That's not to say you shouldn't set up a Google My Business listing as well as a few others where you can hide your client's address. Those things lend to the credibility of your business and are factored into your domain authority as well. Just don't focus on citation building. Your plan is a good one.

"Are there more advantages in using Moz Local besides the convenience? For those that use it, what else have you found to be beneficial?"

Hi Eric,

In my mind, there are a couple of advantages to using Moz or one of the other high-quality citation building services over doing it manually.

(1) Consistency - you have a way of ensuring your company name, address, and phone number (NAP) data is consistently distributed to a large proportion of local business directories, GPS devices, and local applications in the United State. Consistency is one of the ways you ensure your business is being credited with all the citations you build.

(2) Accuracy - Moz points out errors, inconsistencies, and duplicates which you then have the opportunity to fix. When you build citations manually, it can be difficult to identify and fix these. (3) Completeness - Moz gives you a single point of contact for distribution of your citation data to the four local data aggregators and Foursquare (which feeds Pinterest and other local search apps).

(3) Completeness - Moz gives you a single point of contact for distribution of your citation data to the four local data aggregators and Foursquare (which feeds Pinterest and other local search apps).

(4) Convenience (as you mentioned) - The single point of contact is especially helpful if you plan on updating supplementary data like photos and menus, have a large number of reviews you want to track and respond to, or if you know the business plans on moving or changing its phone number in the near future.

(5) Support - I personally find the tool and process very confusing but Moz has great support and they get back to you quickly. Local search is very confusing in its own right. This is not necessarily a bad reflection on Moz, as there's always room for improvement.

(6) Cost - The fee is fair and reasonable. Not the cheapest. Also not the most expensive.

I'm not a fan of your plan.

There can be many reasons why a site might "take a hit". For example, if page-to-page redirects were not implemented or the sitemap was not updated, updated correctly, or resubmitted to search engines. I wouldn't assume that will happen in your case. In my experience, if the transition is done correctly and there's a hit, it's short-lived.

If you're thinking the redirects will cause you to lose SEO equity, that is no longer the case. Gary Illyes, a Google webmaster trends analyst, tweeted on July 26, 2016 "30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore."

One of the biggest risks (in my mind) of staging the migration the way you suggest is that the "waves" never happen. I see that a lot - a situation where an organization agrees to postpone work to a future date that never arrives. New and competing priorities take precedence resulting in an endless postponement. If you have the management commitment, funding and resources to do the work now, I say bite the bullet and go for it. Make a plan. Stick to it. Check and double check your work.

Kodiiac,

If you want your Google business listing to be a service area listing, you're going to have to verify your business using Facebook because Moz can only validate Google-listed businesses with visible addresses. Service area listings hide your address.

So although your Moz local score will be lower than you'd probably like, I've been told your local data will still be distributed to Moz's total network of recipients so long as it has been verified using Facebook. Hopefully lisapeterman will chime back in if I've unintentionally misled you, but that's my understanding.

I agree with Kevin. Ahref has that capability assuming you don't run into size constraints. Here's a quick post that explains where to find it. (See https://ahrefs.com/blog/turning-broken-links-site-powerful-links-ahrefs-broken-link-checker/.)

Hi Kimberley,

1- Should we create multiple location pages for the same franchise owner?

You're right, the answer is "yes" but the objective of creating a single page per location is not so your franchisee shows up in local search results (on Google Maps), but so they show up in organic search results.

Can they just use a friend's/relative's address?

You need a unique mailing address for each location you want to show up in maps. A place where someone will answer the phone during business hours with a typical business greeting like "XYZ Business. How can I help you." I don't recommend using friends/relatives addresses for lots of reasons including the fact that friends and relatives move and you'd still have to incur the cost of getting a unique phone number and optimizing a business listing for each location.

2. It seems like a lot less work just building one landing page for each location, but is the payoff the same?

More is better. Google favors fresh, active, and growing websites. Many businesses build a one-page-fits-all solution due to budget constraints. That can work in niche / non-competitive markets, but rarely does otherwise. You should assess your budget, resources, and competition and then decide on an approach.

Have you done a side-by-side comparison of your page to the competition? It could be that on-page isn't that is preventing you from achieving a higher ranking. It could be you don't have enough links, enough powerful links, or links with topical anchor text. It could be (as you mention) speed. If you're trying to rank locally, it could be proximity to the searcher. Or it could be your content doesn't incent engagement. It could be the page hasn't been indexed yet. There are so many possibilities.

I'm not an International SEO expert. This is just my opinion.

I agree with Thomas that links from high-quality destination sites are going to help your rankings regardless. Just to confuse things, I also agree with you that you need to strike a balance when it comes to just how many of your links come from other destinations.

If, for example, you want to rank for SEO in the UK and your website has a majority of incoming links from the UK, I would expect those links reinforce and help boost your UK rankings because Google knows people prefer to shop locally. If, on the other hand, you are trying to rank globally, then you'd want (and benefit from) inbound links from other destinations as well.

So I think your assumptions are good. Reputable inbound links from other destinations are helpful so long as they don't confuse Google about which audience you're targeting. I guess you could use other international SEO techniques like hreflang tags, your URL structure, geo-targeting in GSC, and localized content to reinforce that if you were worried.

I don't know of any case studies on this topic.

So, we all "nofollow" most of the external links or all external links to hold back the page rank.

Nofollowing links does not mean you retain link juice or page rank. That page rank gets dropped rather than being transferred to another location.

Is it all same about external links and nofollow now?

I don't understand your question but if you mean should all external links be nofollow, the answer is no. As Google has suggested, you should still tag trustworthy destination links with the follow attribute.

Agree with the others - it's likely custom. Google Analytics lumps traffic sourced from Google My Business listings into organic search results. If you want to see how these things are typically set up, check out this post from Moz (2011) or this one from localseoguide (2015).

What is a realistic timeline to increase a website's domain authority by 20 points?

Years. Domain authority uses a logarithmic scale like the Richter scale used to measure earthquakes. Every notch you move up the rung takes exponentially more time, discipline, creativity, outreach, and energy.

If you're asking the question b/c you have to set expectations with someone, I'm with Gaston and would suggest you set business goals and a realistic timeline to reach them versus relying on a metric that correlates with high rankings. Think leads and downloads. If it's an e-commerce site, think sales. Things that are easier to measure and explain to the business.

What are the most important factors to increase a website's domain authority?

Someone from Moz would have to answer that. Here is the page on their site that best explains it. My understanding is the domain authority metric tries to mirror Google's interpretation of a website's importance and would expect incoming links and their sources to be given considerable weight in the calculation.

It sounds like it might be a theme setting. Some themes come with their own baked-in SEO functionality that can be turned off or on. I'd check that first.