Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi guys! There has been an unusual amount of traffic to one particular page on our blog. Now that the business is slow, I had the time to look into it. Half of that traffic is coming from India and we are a Chicago based limo service. We 'll skip why that happens part for now.
I let Hotjar record 100 session and upon reviewing them I have noticed a lot of sessions with no interaction, no mouse movement, no clicks;  just scroll and exit. My question is related to implementing a type of verification (captcha) for that blog page to see if the bots / behavior changes.
Are there any downside in terms of in page SEO for this type of implementation? 
What is good practice for something like this?

Hi guys,

I am looking for a trusted, digital marketing company specializing in local search services and SEO. I would prefer to be from around Chicago due to the type of business we are in, limousine business, but ultimately, I would be willing to try someone from a different city but it needs to have experience in this type of business. If you know someone, please send me a private message and I will give you more info. I am not looking for a 2-3 man company, we are past that stage. I know about Moz's recommended companies, none of them are from Chicago, bummer.

Thanks!

Hi guys,

Is there any way I can respond or have a review deleted from one of my clients' profile on Indeed.com? Is there a mediation process of any sort?

Thanks.

Thanks Miriam, I actually reached out to Phil before posting here, I know he is very knowledgeable in this space.

Do you know anything about Facebook reviews? Are they important enough to go after them?

Thanks Cody!

The immediate goal is to gather more reviews, building a stronger brand presence falls on the second place. What would be the best social sites to share the content / infographics on besides Facebook and Twitter?

I found a way (finally!) to find out which of my customers who have a gmail account have also a Google plus account. That helps a lot. We use to send handout reviews or video instructions about how to create a Google plus account...and it didn't go to well.

Now that we know they have a G+ account , all we have to do is ask for a review; how to do this?
What are the latest strategies so that the review will stay there?

• have them log in, search for the business name and write the review?
• give them the direct link?
• is the searcher's path important?
• should we look for users who are engaged more in their circles?

Thanks!

We signed up with a reviews aggregator to try to leverage Adwords a little better.  We have a 2 months trial after which we have to pay the monthly fee.
Their technical department told us that we have to wait for up to 12 weeks for those reviews to be displayed along Google Adwords ads and of course, if we meet the other criteria, which we are.

I want to know where I can find that information about the waiting time and why there is such a long time?

Thanks guys!

I have gathered already hundreds of keywords relevant to my business, I will give Wordstream a try.

Thanks for the link!

I want to outsource my Adwords campaign and I have a few questions. I have been playing with it for a few days-weeks but didn't have enough time to fully engage.

Where would I start?
What questions should I ask?
Are there any general goals before setting specific ones?
How would I know their price is right?
How to measure what they do?

Thanks!

Yelp and Google, what would be the right path customers have to follow in order for their reviews to be posted and more importantly, to stay there?

Done, no warnings, everything looks good.

No alerts at all, no warnings of any kind..we have been hit by Panda 2.0 but since then we managed to stop the fall until a few days ago when the homepage disappeared from Google's index.

The Title says it all..I just discovered that the Homepage is not in Google's index anymore. Homepage rankings have plummeted, our top keywords are nowhere to be found but most of keywords from deeper pages have dropped just one or two places.

We just change the website design and some content but I strongly believe this is definitely something else due to the fact that it all happened so fast!

There is one thing that I have to mention that might have been caused all this..our email client (Outlook) is using a lot of resources from our server and for the last couple of days the website was down quite a lot.
There are some crawling errors in GWT but the homepage has been crawled because is not there, no other messages.

Where should I look for?

This would be a good starting point  http://moz.com/community/users/63

Same here.

Did anybody else notice this? It started a few weeks ago, every time that I receive an email from Moz regarding a Q&.A update and I try to open it, my Outlook becomes unresponsive and I have to restart it.

I would start by asking a few questions like:

• how long have you been having those links for?
• have you seen a important decrease in traffic or rankings since you acquired those links?
• is the anchor text the same for all of those links?
• have you experienced traffic and rankings decrease after Penguin 2.0?

You have to make sure first those links hurt you before starting disavowing them. Check your Google Analytics and Google webmaster tools for any warnings or penalties. If everything looks fine I wouldn't do it although I must say that many links looks suspicious.
Keep building links from trusted websites and create useful content, there is no way around it.

I would say 3 months is not too much to wait to see some ranking movement. I have waited about the same for my first website.

A couple of things that I have noticed:

• your anchor text is targeting almost exclusively your homepage with little to no variation
• your Title needs a little work, try to have your targeted keywords at the beginning of the sentence
• you rank in page 8 for mobility scooter in Google UK

Depending where you want to rank for the keywords, I would start searching in the Q&A section for "co.uk", there are quite a few valuable answers like this one:

http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-best-way-to-rank-well-on-both-google-co-uk-google-com

One more resource:

http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/white-paper/google-ranking-factors-uk-2012/

Good luck!

I wish I had..we have been hit pretty hard as well, lost rankings for 70% of all keywords targeting the Homepage, with all types of anchor text. I would say, if you can do something about those bad links, do it; that shouldn't hurt you but,  I would start building a few strong links as soon as possible too. Going forward, it seems very clear to me that paid links and more than 30 to 40% exact anchor text backlinks will not influence rankings anymore. As far as I can see, there is no real recovery story after this update. If the rankings are where they used to be, proceed with caution, keep building valuable links and keep an eye on your Google Analytics.

Good luck and keep us posted.

Dr Pete, based on your questions, it looks like our website has been hit by Penguin 2.0.

"(1) Did the drop happen right on May 22 (Penguin 2.0) or earlier/later? Right on May 22

(2) I see a solid loss in the top 3 - which specific keywords were these, and do they have any commonalities (branded vs. non-brand, for example)? Loss in traffic (40%) exactly after May 22nd and rankings dropped for both branded and non branded keywords anywhere from 1 to 17 positions.

(3) Were these keywords all ranking for the same page? Was it your home-page or a deeper page (it's possible this impacted a specific page or set of pages)? Pretty much, 90% of them were ranking for the Homepage but all the inner pages have been affected.

No manual penalty or warnings in GWT, pages are indexed/cached and loading normal.

Thanks again Miriam, you have been very helpful indeed!

can we see the URL?

Thanks  Miriam, this is what I have gathered from the internet as well but I needed to be sure. The excel file with all the directories and citations is ready.

A couple of follow up questions:

• What would happened with the reviews, are they moving the over to the new listing?

• In your opinion, how long does it take to get the rankings back up (assuming they will go down for while). I read Nyagoslav's article where it says ""In a competitive niche it may take 6+ months for a listing to regain the same power as its old “closed” brethren. Even in very low competitive niches it takes at least a few weeks."

• I am in the process of merging the listings (Google + and Google places), should I still proceed with changing the address or should I wait?
  Update: See response from Google Help below_: "Hello, it looks like you verified a non-storefront business in Google+ which does not make contact with walk-in customers at the business location. We don't currently support this type of business in Google+ Local. We've ask that you continue to manage it through the Google Places dashboard." ; they are_ basically telling me they will not merge the two listings.

How would you go about changing an address for a SAB (service area business) ? Phone number will remain the same, the new address is about 4 miles away, same city, different zip code.

We are having our website redesigned by an SEO company to increase CTR and for a better user experience and I was wondering what to look for and what key questions to ask. At the moment we rank very well for a few strong keywords and I m afraid that by rewriting the content and changing the website layout we might put at risk some of the rankings even for a brief period of time. This company seems to be very good so I need to know what to ask them to make sure everything goes according to plan.

Your thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks Aleyda, mobile website development is something new for and since we developed this in house, we are not sure if we have done the right thing, if we have duplicate content. Is there any way we can check for duplicate content? Could you take a look at our website and its mobile version and let us know what you think?

Thank you!

Your guy seems very professional, we are setting up a different project. For local, I chose somebody else indeed but just for troubleshooting the pages..it seems I should have hired the other company to do everything.

I was afraid you were going to say that. The Local SEO company that I work with for making sure our Google Places page and Google plus page are properly optimized suggested that in order for me to rank for my keywords, I have to put the geo terms in the new custom categories. This company has been referred by somebody that you know well, an expert in Local SEO and a Google forum moderator. I know that she just teaches those people what to do and it is up to them to implement it but I thought I would share this information here because if somebody else would have been in my place, they would have been penalized.  When I saw the company's proposal, I came here for help because you guys are the only ones that I truly trust.

Thanks for your help!

Thanks Ian, the sad part is that this Local SEO company has been referred by a very trusted Local SEO member,  which I am sure you heard about. Turns out that the company that she endorsed is not so good as she thinks it is.

Hi Miriam,

The problem is that my Dashboard has the old interface, I can still create custom categories. The question is, should I add "Chicago" to my keywords or not? Somebody else just answer here saying that this would be against Google guidelines.

Thanks Ian, I should have looked this question up before posting..I see that your response is in line with all the other ones when it comes to Google categories. Follow up question: do you have the exact paragraph on Google guidelines specifying that you shouldn't add location based information to your categories?

Thanks!

Free trial for 30 days, thanks, looks promising.

Hi Miriam, I just ask a new question and I thought I might get a faster answer here. Here is the question: in Google Local, my first category is limousine service, which I picked it from the pre-selected categories, should I create new other categories which will be basically other high traffic keywords?

This is what it says on Google Help:

"Categories: Select at least one category from the list of available categories."

Are there any rules against this practice?

I checked Mike's categories's tool as well and this is what I got: Limousine Service, limo, limos, limosine, limousine. Should I create custom categories for all these keywords? The SEO company that I work with suggested to add a Geo modifier to better target our main keywords.

I work with a Local SEO company for troubleshooting our Google Places and optimization. They suggested that in order for us to rank for the keywords we provided them with they need to change the categories. Now, those categories do not exist in Google Places and I read on Seomoz and Google help forum that we should choose from the ones in the list provided by Google. I also know that  Categories should not contain location-based information.

Should I let them do that?

Google places account does not show rankings, just impressions for top 10 queries. Seomoz rankings show only local results for my keywords not for the ones I don t know.

Thanks!

Is there a way to see what keywords I rank for in Google Places?

Thanks David!

That is always though because as you know the address is part of NAP consistency which is at the core of local ranking factors. I would suggest getting some unstructured citation (partial citations) just by using his phone number or his company name.

http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/13-what-is-a-citation

http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/12-how-to-identify-quality-citation-sources

Good luck!

Hi Belle, first of all, Google will serve you the desktop version of a website if there is no mobile version available. IMO it is quite possible in the near future to see only mobile versions. Here are a few resources that you might find interesting:

http://searchengineland.com/mobile-seo-is-not-a-myth-8-popular-claims-refuted-141386

http://searchengineland.com/google-patents-the-mobile-search-blend-145574

http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/

What makes Google choose when to show a local listing vs an organic one?

I found this resource a few days ago, have a look please, I think it answers your question.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/01/23/html5-vs-native-mobile-apps-myths-and-misconceptions/

Great resource William, thanks!

Thanks William, I did use that tool but it did not returned to many options as it did by studying the competition and the answers here.

Have a look at the resources below and let me know if you need more help. Responsive web design is recommended by Google but it does not apply to all websites. You have to take into consideration things like user intent, navigation, content. There is a lot of debate about it here on Seomoz and I would proceed carefully by reading some of the resources below. One thing I would advice though is to keep the robots blocked until you figure out what you want. In my opinion, Bryson Meunier has written quite a lot about the subject on several respected blogs in the industry.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/search/label/mobile

http://www.brysonmeunier.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design

http://www.seomoz.org/q/mobile-seo-tips-and-best-practices

Hope it helps!

I think the question summarizes it pretty well. Did anybody experienced this, to rank for one or multiple keywords in both local and organic search results?

For a SAB (service area business) would it help to have a map of their location on the Homepage?

Hi Miriam, I already read 2 out of 3 forum messages above, I read the third one now and applied the instructions but I get the same message. I will try to get Linda or Vanessa involved.

Thanks for your help!

I am sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I was asking about the quality of unstructured citations and the places you get them from, not about reviews although, it is a very interesting piece to read.

Thanks again Miriam for contributing! Yes, I do know but it was more of a reassurance for a colleague of mine.