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Wow,

Tom, thank you for the amazingly complete and well articulated response.   You, kind sir, are a interwebs Rock Star!

Webmaster Tools is reporting crawl errors for pages that do not exist due to how my Joomla menu system works. Example, I have a menu item named "Service Area" that stores 3 sub items but no actual page for Service Area. This results in a URL like domainDOTcom/service-area/service-page.html

Because the Service Area menu item is constructed in a way that shows the bot it is a link, I am getting a 404 error saying it can't find domainDOTcom/service-area/ (The link is to "javasript:;") Note, the error doesn't say domainDOTcom/service-area/javascript:; it just says /service-area/

What is the best way to handle this? Can I do something in robots.txt to tell the bot that this /service-area/ should be ignored but any page after /service-area/ is good to go? Should I just mark them as fixed as it's really not a 404 a human will encounter or is it best to somehow explain this to the bot? I was advised on google forums to try this, but I'm nervous about it.

Disallow: /service-area/*
Allow: /service-area/summerlin-pool-service.
Allow: /service-area/north-las-vegas
Allow: /service-area/centennial-hills-pool-service

I tried a 301 redirect of /service-area to home page but then it pulls that out of the url and my landing pages become 404's.

http://www.lvpoolcleaners.com/

Thanks for any advice!

Derrick

Thanks Mike..

So your suggestion would be to focus on the local results instead of organic results, correct?

I have a challenge there as the business is run out of a home in New Market, but my target locations are lakeville, apple valley and so on.  I listed the cities in google places account but there seems to be a conflict with my G+ account that has me verified in New Market.. Anyway, that's probably another question topic..

The site is yalecreeksc.com

After just a couple months I'm placing on the first page for some keywords but I need advice on how to get over the hump.

Search results for "Lakeville Snow Plowing" and "Lakeville Snow Removal" return directory results for the 1rst 3 listings above the local results.. I'm right below that at 5 and 7..  (I'm not showing up in local results even though I have a radius but that's another issue)

Any tips or advice to compete against these type of results rather than a direct competitor?   How does a small company with limited to no budget go about outranking BBB and Manta.com?

I'm considering purchasing the BBB membership, and I imagine a link from them would be helpful, other than that, I could use some advice.

Derrick

Thanks Miriam.. I will try having my wife add photos to the G± listing from her account..

No, I am not familiar with "poke."

A search result that contains my google plus / places page in the local results is not displaying photos correctly in the preview.    It shows an image that appears to represent a broken link or missing image, however, when you click on the "See Photos" link it to takes you to the G+ page that displays the photos without any issues.

I also checked the google places account and the photos appear fine in my dashboard.   It's seems like maybe a 3rd party uploaded photos or something?  It may have to do with the recent upgrade to pages at Google +? (Thats another story, thanks for making me create a circular logo and a cover photo that doesn't style well in your mobile app)

Anyway, any thoughts?  Where are these photos coming from, plus or places account?  I submitted the question on google groups and a non googler told me to submit photos from a unrelated account.. This seems like gaming the system to me and when I looked into it, it takes me to the Google + page..

Search URL - I am first result in local, Yale Creek Seasonal Care.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=new+market+mn+snow+removal&oq=new+market+mn+snow+removal&gs_l=hp.3...1801.1801.0.2686.1.1.0.0.0.0.143.143.0j1.1.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.5.hp.nKsMdxTGiW0

Also, I noticed the G+ account says service area is 20 miles from address while I specifically selected an area greater than that in my places account..  So what is it plus or places?!?!?   The way they are rolling out this move to plus is frustrating!   As a consumer, I prefer listings without the plus page!!

Thanks Miriam -

I wish there were clear cut guidelines for this so I didn't have to guinea pig it.

Derrick

Sorry, I am referring to schema.

Hello -

I am considering adding geotags to landing pages for services offered. The problem I have is that the physical location of the business, registered on Google places, is different from where these services are performed. The company is a lawn care provider that services several small cities and is based out of our residence. I plan on creating landing pages for each of these cities so I am hoping to use these tags to indicate to the world that this location is my desired audience.

Example, the business is in a town called New Market, MN population small so that is my location on Google places. 99.9% of the business we do is done in neighboring cities of Northfield, Lakeville and Eagan.

Is is it an acceptable practice to put geotags on landing pages for those cities or would this be considered dirty pool? On the eagan-lawn-care page place a geotag for Eagan and a different one on the Lakeville page?

Gracias!

Derrick

Tom -

< sarcasm > I will be sure to pass on the tips to my competitor.. Gee Thanks

I think you read the post wrong.. I was wondering what my competition is up to.

Derrick

Tom -

< sarcasm > I will be sure to pass on the tips to my competitor.. Gee Thanks

I think you read the post wrong.. I was wondering what my competition is up to.

Derrick

I'm researching a competitor using site explorer and the seomoz toolbar and getting some strange results.

When you search by the domain name in site explorer you get no results, but the toolbar shows 170K incoming links.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com

I noticed the top referring page was a strange internal url so I ran that through site explorer and discovered 19 links.. When you put the strange link in a browser, it redirects to the home url;..  At this url the toolbar shows 220 links and semoz shows 19

http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/?xid_78e7f=0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com%2F%3Fxid_78e7f%3D0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c

What is up with that url?  What are they doing? This is a site ranking #1 for my local search term even though he has about 50 pages of almost duplicate content.  See link below.   I'm really scratching my head here.

http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/home.php?all=categories

Edited - 1 week unanswered.  Resubmitted with a different title.

I provide local services to a number of small cities and am trying to decide the best way to attack local keywords.   I need to decide if I should target all 4 cities or narrow it down to 1 or 2.   I used the google keyword tool and none of my keywords have enough results to show data so I am left guessing by using the nearest major city and population sizes.

Anyway, I have read over and over about how keywords in the title / description are imperative.  Well, thats tough to accomplish without being spammy when you offer two services for four cities.   I don't think lakeville snow removal, apple valley snow removal, eagan snow removal makes for a good title of a page.   Also, it's not an easy task to get any kind of keyword density in the content as well.  So how do you recommend I attack this?

I have seen sites that create a page for each keyword with basically the same content excpet replacing city x with city y and they do well.  I find this spammy and hope that eventually they get penalized for it.   I guess I would be willing to do it, but would prefer a more natural solution.

One more question, if I do keyword a single city, say Lakeville, what is the prefered way to keyword the home page compared to the service pages.  Example, I have a snow removal page that the keywords would be lakeville snow removal and a lawn care page with the same.. So what is the target for the home page?

Here is the results of my keyword research.

** Monthy Google Searches** Minneapolis lawn care - 880 Minneapolis lawn service - 590 Minneapolis lawn mowing - 260

Minneapolis Snow Removal - 590 Minneapolis Snow Plowing - 320 Minneapolis Snow Removal services - 58

Service Area Data (Minni has Pop of 385K)

Lakeville - Pop;56K Income;86K Apple Valley - Pop;49K Income;74K Burnsville - Pop;60K Income;60K Eagan - Pop;64K Income;74K Northfield - Pop;20K Income;62K

Thanks Littlesthobo!

I feel I am doing the right things, as you described, socially.  Have all the accounts and I dedicate a couple hours every Friday to social.

"Also ensure you have cast iron on page, pick a keyword per page and make sure the page fully reflects that keyword"

I am going to start a new topic about this because I have a interesting problem.  Being that I service rural area, my ideal keywords consist of four cities and two services.  Thats tough sledding when trying to build a site that is easy to navigate, visually appealing and optimized.  I assume it's not wise to put "city y service, city x service, city z service" in the title and then try to naturally implement all those keywords into said service page.

I need to decide if I should limit my city to 1 or build multiple pages for each city.   Each has it's pros and cons from my inexperienced point of view.  The multiple pages looks amateur-ish and  takes away from navigation / appeal.  (Lakeville lawn care page, eagan lawn care page, apple valley lawn care page) The one city limits my potential customers.

As a start up business, I am leaning toward 1 city and then worrying about expanding the scope of the site later, but am certainly open to suggestions.

Thanks for the reply, Takeshi!

"In general, what Google is looking for is reviews of your product that people have left on your site. "

Interesting.   So even if I were to take a Google review and highlight as an achievement on my site, with a link back to the review on Google, it could be frowned upon?

So in order to implement rish snippets for reviews, as intended by Google, I need to setup a review system on my site?  I find that strange,   Who is monitoring the authenticity of the reviews, Me.. Great... Who is denying all reviews under 4 stars, me.

Seems to me a more ethical practice would be to link to reviews on 3rd party sites.  Sure, I can chose to only link to the positive, but at least its from a 3rd party site  and while there the user can see my other reviews.

"The semantic markup code you wrote above looks fine, just be sure to put a space where you put "itemscopeitemtype" (it should be "itemscope itemtype")"

Thanks, I will make that correction!

Thanks for the detailed response, James!

I have setup the G+ account and local listings on Google, Bing and Yahoo but I am disadvantaged there as well.  The business is run out of a home in PoDonk, MN, population 1K, while my potential customers and competitors are all in the cities. When you search for "PoDonk, MN Keyword" I do just fine.  Problem is, everyone who lives in Podonk already has a plow on their truck and half of them probably don't have an internet connection.

I noticed Google offered more options in the local listing as far as adding cities serviced, so I took advantage of that.  The search results are not good at the moment for those cities but I am hoping by taking advantage of snippets with rel=author, reviews and location to improve.  (This is where I will take your advice about offering discounts / begging for reviews and +1's.)  I do wonder if having the markups for location is a hinderence if I am not located in the desired service area?

I do have one major advantage over my competitors and that is time on my hands and a touch of internet savvy.

I have a brand new domain, 2 months old, and am just finishing design.  What are realistic goals for the 1rst year in local search results?

My competition appears to be the local directories.   Manta, yellowpages, angieslist, BBB and so on.   Is it realistic to expect to eventually outrank them for the local search terms?  (City Service Keyword)  If so, what is a realistic time frame for someone putting in 10 to 15 hours a week on SEO, Including content creation.

This was the humbling report I just ran.  Looks like my choices are to beat them or pay them excessive amounts of money.

http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty/results.html?commit=Run+Report&date=2013-02-19&engine_id=96&keywords=Lakeville+snow+plowing&utf8=✓

Question about rich snippets..

I want to showcase reviews of the SERVICE's offered  but I am not sure if I should include them on the service page, a review page or both.  For example, we offer snow plowing and lawn care services and each service has its own page.  I have reviews for both services under the my "testimonials" page.   So, a couple questions.

1 - Should I pace a single review marked up on each service page?

2 - Does the review need to be a google review or can I use reviews from other sites?  If not, do I need to notate that somehow using the schema vocabulary?  Example, I have a 5 star review from thumbtrackDOTcom, is it ok to mark up the review and include a nofollow link? (No follow because thumbtrack is actually a competitor.)

3 - When I looked into creating an aggregate rich snippet I got confused / concerned.  Is it ok to list multiple services as a product?  Example:

<div< span="">itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"> <span< span="">itemprop="name">Lawn Care and Snow Removal</span<> <div< span="">itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
Rated <span< span=""> itemprop="ratingValue">4.5</span<>/5 
based on <span< span=""> itemprop="reviewCount">4</span<> customer reviews</div></div<></div<>

4 - When I tested the code above, no stars showed up in the preview.  Do I need to mark up products as well?  Am I doing it completely wrong

Thanks for any advice!!