Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have a question based on this scenario: An apartment building changes ownership. Previous owners were terrible and online listings have had terrible reviews. Since the apartment building now has a new brand name, new office address and phone number, the new owners want to create new online listings instead of claiming the old listings with the bad reviews. Also they want to report the old listings as "closed". They would like to remove the old listings with bad reviews from the old management and old brand name and start fresh, since they plan many improvements. Has anyone tried this strategy? How much luck has anyone had rebranding an apartment building and reporting old business listings as closed?

Hello!

Unfortunately it is difficult to give you a concrete answer without an understanding of your CMS and website structure. However, one thing did stand out to me. You mentioned above that you receive 100s of 404s every few months. Is there any reason why you are not implementing 301 redirects for these? When a 301 redirect is set up if a user where to try to navigate to a page that 404s they would be automatically redirected to another closely related page instead.

^Caitlin

Thanks for your response. So, I guess there's no way for Moz to fix listings out there with invalid addresses. Since we certainly wouldn't want to create G+ or FB listings with an incorrect address and Moz can't find the business unless the address matches the G+ or FB listings, then we can't claim and fix the incorrect listings through Moz's service.

Yes, Panda began rolling out at this time. You should check out Moz's Google Algorithm Change History page for a full list of updates. It's great!

Great insights from Devanur! I also want to quickly add..

As your DA or PA gets higher it takes additional effort to increase authority. In other words, it is much easier to boost your DA from 10 to 20 than it would be to be boost your DA from 80 to 90.

^Caitlin

Awesome! I checked it out and everything looks good.

Regarding the temporary redirects. I don't really have enough information to answer this question. A temporary, or 302 redirect, is seen by the search engines, as just that - temporary. Therefore, any authority does not pass through. In a 301 redirect, like the ones you created for the www. vs. non-www the authority passes through as the search engine understands the redirect to be permanent. Therefore, I would try and figure this out with your web developer.

In the meantime, I would download an extension such as Ayima Redirect Tool and take a look at the pages that have 302 redirects and where they are being redirect from. With the tool you may be able to figure out what is going on.

^Caitlin

I've noticed that there are two versions of the link you provided:

http://champu.in/che-guevara-red-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india

and

http://www.champu.in/che-guevara-red-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india

Google see's these as two separate pages and, as a result, duplicate content. A 301 redirect should be created from one to the other to resolve this issue. Is this is happening across the site rel="canonical' needs to be implemented site wide.

^Caitlin

Outside of title tags and descriptions, I would recommend fixing up the video transcripts. The automatic transcripts are filled with errors. Also, if you are embedding your videos on your own website, video for schema is the way to go! ^Caitlin

We just started using Moz Local for a law office client. The csv has the client's correct information. However, our client has listings out there with a completely incorrect address/city and alternate phone number. There wouldn't be a valid FB or G+ listing for this incorrect address to use for validation. Is there any way Moz Local can find these and correct them by matching name or website alone? The incorrect ones are not showing up in the list of duplicates.

Hi there!

You will need to implement 301 redirects to the new URLs that you are creating. This tells the search engines that the blog post is being permanently redirected to your new URLs. If 301 redirects are not implemented two things can happen:

1. If you kill the old page you will have a whole mess of 404 errors and the authority they old pages built up would be lost and not transferred to the new domains.

2. If you simply create copies of the blog post and do not redirect you will have a lot of duplicate content issues to deal with.

I hope this helps! ^Caitlin

I agree with Dean above. Subdomains split your authority. Basically, this means that Google considers wow.icey-veins.com and hearthstone.iceyveins.com as two separate websites in their book. For this reason, folders would have been the far better solution - the site's authority would have remained the same and any additional folders added to the site and resulting links to that folder would have continued to build up the website's authority.

Don't get me wrong, there are a number of websites that utilize subdomains (typically very large sites). In fact, it use to be very common in year's past. However, subdomains are no longer seen as SEO best practice. ^Caitlin

Ultimately, as Aaron says above, it does depend on what kind of site you are running and how active you are on the networks. However, social media outlets are a great way to enhance communication with your customers! For me, personally, when I am on a new website I look at their linking social media links. I find that I get a better feel for their product and/or services and a better idea of the brand's 'personality', so to speak. ^Caitlin

Hello Tony,

I wish I could be of more help. Unfortunately, I am unfamiliar with this platform. One thing that I noticed is that that you said the following link 404'd: http://www.tonyhill.net/craftfeathers.ivnu. However, for me, it loads just fine.

One recommendation I have would be to download the following redirect checker http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/redirect-checker.html. Once in your dashboard it will notify you if a redirect that you implemented is properly resolving.

Remember to create 301 redirect not 302. 302 redirects are meant to be temporary and, as a result, link equity will not flow through them. 301 redirects are considered permanent.

I hope this provides some help! ^Caitlin

Long term keywords are highly targeted which means that, overall, there is generally less competition. While 4th July Dog Harness may not be receiving as much traffic as the other keywords you had mentioned, there is less competitions. This means that the chances of your website being served up in the SERPs for this search are much higher - which is what you want ^Caitlin

I came across the following:

Please be aware that even though you’ve deleted it, some of the information you’ve added about your business may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our backup systems for an additional period of time. Information that you may have added but is also publically available or from other sourceswon’t be removed. The full article can be found here. Hope this helps! ^Caitlin

I agree with Keri. Why not looking for some guest blogging opportunities. Try this out - do the following search in Google:

[subject of choice] + intitle:"write for us" or [subject of choice] + intitle:"guest post"

For example, if I was looking to write on recycling I would do the following search:

recycling + intitle:"write for us"

With a little digging some great opportunities should pop up! ^Caitlin

Happy New Year Moz'ers!

Our agency has recently had  a number of new clients who were hit by the Penguin updates. These sites came to us over the last two months so they've been dealing with Penguin for months.

Looking at Google Analytics for each client, I'm seeing a lot of the same patterns - mostly a large first drop in traffic after the update and then a long, steady decline in organic traffic over the months that follow. I have seasonal factors for traffic dips for each client but I'm curious as to what other Moz'ers are finding long term.

Do you see a large traffic drop followed by a sustained plateau?

Do you see a large traffic drop followed by a long, slow decrease over the weeks or months that follow?

Do you see something else?

Thanks!

<jason @sonray=""></jason>

I've been looking into G+ and how to get the information and status updates in to the Knowledge Graph for small companies and have not been able to. Does anyone know exactly how to do it?

I am recently seeing some URLs come up as 404s in GWMTs for a client.  They look like this:

http://client-url/out/www.linkedin.com/company/client-linkedin-name

/out/client-url/sub-directory/postname/

We thought they might have something to do with the social plugins but they are all over the place and they are sometime for internal pages on the site. Anyone run into these and know why they are happening?

Thanks Anthony!

You bring up some good points and getting volunteers involved is a great idea.

Cheers,

-Jason

Greetings Moz'ers!

I'm in the process of optimizing a non-profit's website that has an interesting dilemma: They lack the resources to create their own content so they search the web for videos, quotes, blogs, pictures, etc. to post on their website. As the "good guys" their cause is just but because they are essentially scrapping content from other sites they are considered "bad guys" in Google's eyes and are getting hit with duplicate content penalties.

What they are doing isn't much different than what the major news sites do - they just want to be a good resource center. The content that they are using is relevant to the cause and they give credit on everything they post by linking to where the content came from.

Any recommendations on how I can help them?

Thanks,

Jason

Thanks everyone for your input...this was very helpful and on target with what we were thinking.

We have a local client who services are very broad and there is no one service, i.e. keyword or keyword phrase, that covers all that they do.  This is making it very challenging to select keywords to optimize the homepage for.  Basically they do everything from engineering, surveying, planning, environmental, etc.  We were thinking we would focus mainly on their most important service which is engineering and then use the other services as supporting phrases.  However, this feels very diluted and there will be pages on the site for each of these services where the keywords will be targeted.  Any thoughts or recommendations for this type of situation?

That is great. Thank you Alan.

Hi,

I was wondering if you may know if you have to keep to the

and coding when adding schema code to the site. For example if I'm already using H and P tags can I add the "itemprop" to those or do they have to be in aor as in the example below:

<span itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwavespan>
Product description:
<span itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave. Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.span>

So could I code it like this?

<h1 itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwaveh1>
Product description:
<p itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave. Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.p>

Thank you,
Etela

Thanks for the input.  In this particular case, the pricing is not an issue as the client has a MAP policy in place so they will actually have a lower or exact match price to their dealers.  The issue is more about the best place for them to be visible and not so much about them selling products through the marketplace.

Does anyone have experience with outcomes on listing your products under grouped search results as opposed to separated out.  It seems that this can be easily accomplished by using a SKU that is different then others in the listing but I wonder if one ranks better over the other (it appears that grouped searched rank a bit higher).  It seems that it would be best to take into consideration the audience you are targeting and what their habits are, i.e. would they be more likely to click on the group searches and look for products that way or do they want to find a reputable brand and would more likely click on that.  Any help or thoughts would be appreciated as I am not really finding any information on this subject.

Thanks everyone for your input - much appreciated!

If you have video on your YouTube channel that someone else downloads and then reuploads to their channel, is it duplicate content (even though right now video cannot be crawled)?

They have a caching system where they assign multiple ip's based on location and we are curious how it affects SEO.