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.

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 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?

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?

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

We all now how important citations are, structured and unstructured for local results. Oftentimes, as David Mihm said, they are the factor that could tilt the balance.
It is also true that the higher the authority of a website the more weight Google puts on a citation. My question is, how far should you go after those unstructured citations, would you get them from everywhere you can if the number and not the quality would be the difference between number 1 and number 2 spot in Google local?

From a local perspective, if the legal name of the business is "Rising Realty, Inc", when you added in your footer should I loose the "Inc" part to be consistent with all the other mentions of the business across the web, which are without "Inc"? Thank you!

Should I be worry that the link below returns that message?  My listing is live and well, it can be accessed from anywhere except from Google places page, under "Respond to reviews
Owners can post a public response to **reviews **by Google users." Any thoughts?

I manage the Google places page for a SAB (local limousine company). The question is, should I add "taxi" and "airport shuttle service" as categories? I have listed only "limousine" and "car service' for now and I want to play it safe although those 2 are related to limo service. Sometimes people refer to limo service as "taxi service" or they are inquiring about prices for shuttle service to the airport and they end up booking the service quite often. Does Google look to our website to find these words in the content? Google Analytics show lots of people are finding us through those two keywords as well although you cannot find the word “taxi" on our website. The interesting thing is that when searching for "taxi + my zip code" the company shows up 4th on maps results and when searching for "shuttle service + my zip code”, the company shows up 2nd on local results and also 2nd in organic results. Is this enough to make me add these 2 categories? Second question is about the area served, does it make a difference (in rankings) if I choose “Distance from one location"over"List of areas served"? What happens is the red pin would be in a different location. If I choose "Distance from one location" the pin would be right in the center of the city (which I think it shouldn't matter anymore that much since the proximity to the centroid is not a ranking factor anymore). If “list of area” served is selected, (the city name will be chosen) then the pin would be about 5 miles West of the city center. Any thoughts will be appreciated. Thank you!

Hello, We have a parallel mobile website and recently we implemented a link pointing to the desktop website. This redirect is happening via a javascript code and results in a url followed by this paramenter: ?m=off Example:
http://www.m.website.com                                 redirects to:
http://www.website.com/?m=off Questions: Will the "http://www.website.com/?m=off" be considered duplicate content with "http://www.website.com" since they both return the same content? Is there any possibility that Google will take into consideration the url ending in "/?m=off"? How should we treat this new url? The webmaster tools URL parameter configuration at the moment isn't experiencing problems but should we submit the parameter anyway in order not to be indexed or should we wait first and see the error response? In case we should submit this for removal... what's the best way to do it? Like this? Parameter: ?m=off Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - doesn't affect page content Any help is much appreciated.
Thank you!

How much would you pay for a Pay Per Click Campaign Optimization? Our monthly budget is around $2k  a month for Adwords. Any advice in choosing the right company to run our Adwords campaign?

How important it is to choose a local SEO company based on their location? How can you check their reliability?

If you perform a search in Google maps for our company and you are not signed in, it returns our Google + page, with reviews, photos, directions and about tabs, which is fine but, when you click on any of the photos, there is a window that opens to the right where you can edit the location where the photo has been taken, a comment box, photo details and above all, right at the top, MY NAME! Why my name? This is the business page, I don't want people to see that. The snip is below. Thanks! g3OTPRp

What is the point of optimizing (on-page SEO) a parallel mobile website if the mobile search results are taken from the general (desktop) index?

After researching and comparing desktop keywords vs mobile keywords, I came to the conclusion that they are pretty much the same, with minor variations. The new keywords for mobile website do not have a great potential for bringing in much traffic. If I don't want to go after those new mobile, do I need to build separate links to our parallel mobile website (URL) to rank better or the link building for my desktop website would be enough to rank for my parallel mobile website as well?

Hello all! This question is about mobile websites. Any suggestions are welcomed. The facts: We have recently built a mobile website for our business using the separate mobile urls (parallel mobile website on a m. sub-domain). We are in the service industry and while our customers are most of the time on the go, it is important for them to find the price and order the service as fast and easy as possible. The redirect from desktop to mobile happens when customers are accessing the website with a mobile devices and it's done automatically. The mobile version does not have any content and serves only as a search and order function. The SEO has been made for the desktop website only and we are ranking really well for all competitive keywords in our niche. We want to keep the mobile website simple and clean so we are not planning to add any content on it.The questions: Since we are not planning to have much content on the mobile website, do we need to do any SEO for it? If yes, why? What are the benefits? Should we add content on the mobile website and why? Is there any down-side from an SEO perspective due to the fact that the website redirects to the mobile version? How are the inbound links going to behave in this case? Do we need to link these two websites although there is no risk about duplicate content? (links, canonical tags, sitemaps) Will the mobile website take advantage of the link building made for the desktop version? Should we allow the mobile website to be indexed having the fact that this is just a search & book tool? (at the moment it is blocked via robots.txt) Thanks for reading, looking forward to your answers.

Is there a minimum Page Rank that we have to be aware of when looking to get a link from a webpage?

According to Matt Cutts latest video about paid links everything that allows Page Rank to pass through is considered paid link and is against Google's rules. I think this is geared more towards directories but aren't 90% of press releases just another form of paid links? You pay to game the system, to manipulate the search engines. He goes on to say that if you "nofollow" the link there will be no penalty. It will be interesting to see how much their revenues will decrease if all press release websites & article distribution networks will have to nofollow their outbound links. He makes it very clear that paid ads are different because they do not manipulate search engines in any way. What do you guys think?

Does anybody know what is going on with this message? Instead of our Google Places page, we get the above message. 😞 To be mentioned that Google representatives called our business to verify this listing 2 times this week... Anybody got the same problem? Thanks!

When editing my Bing business listing, I have noticed that they offer a free mobile website. I was actually looking to build one and I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for. I want to be able to customize it as well. Anybody tried it already? arBS3.jpg

Hi Miriam (and all Local SEO mozers), I read a couple of your answers where you advice people in different situations not to consider a virtual office when creating their Google Places listing and I would like to know if you would apply the same advice in my case. This is the scenario: I have a client who's in the limousine service in Orlando, he just bought the URL and registered the business with the City using a "virtual office" in Orlando. This virtual office provides him a physical address, local area phone number, 411 listing, a listing for the businesses in that building and an office to have his meetings. This is the part where it gets confusing when I read your answers and I will give you an example. You said here:
 _The requirements in order to qualify for a Google Place Page are that you have: __1. A legal business name__2. A local area code phone number__3. A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you or from which your employees depart in order to serve customers at their locations (think chimney sweep, landscaper, etc.)_Number 3 says "A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you".
My client is going to rent one of those virtual offices, which does have a physical address, on as-needed basis. This office actually does exist. Why would Google have anything against it?
One of the reasons why he chose that location is because he is running the business from home and he does not want the clients to see it.
Another reason is the image he wants to create for his company by having a different address where he can hold meetings and such. The phone number will be either a local land-line or a local cell phone number, in any case, it will be a _local area code phone number. _
So this is where we stand: he dispatches the cars from home (he does not have a garage, the cars stay with the drivers 24 hours) but he meets his clients and business partners at the other address. There is nothing fake about it, he does have a legal business name, a local area code number and a real place where customers come to do business with. Which address should I use for his Google Places listing?

Hi everybody! We are planning to offer an incentive to all our customers who interact with us on social media websites. What's the most important thing to ask from a customer? Facebook to like our Facebook business page or to like our own website through Facebook? to just follow us on Facebook or to actually comment / interact on our wall? Google + to +1, share, add to circle our Google+ business webpage or to +1 or share our own website? So basically what do we need to promote most? Our Facebook / Google+ business pages or our own website through social media marketing? While we understand it's important to actually interact with the customers and offer value on social media websites, we are looking to boost our SEO efforts. Thank you!

After reading this blog entry from Dr Pete on Mirametrix, my question would be:
What's more important for a local company, being in the 7 pack or in the top 10 organic results? Which one attracts more clicks? Is the optimization for local ranking just became more important than the traditional SEO?

What is the best way to find local resources to gain reviews and citations from to help with strengthening  your position in Google Places?

When commenting on blogs and the only link you can have is your author name (Ex. Commented by Mike), what are you gonna have, a name, the name of your company or the keyword that you are trying to rank for? Thanks!

2011, what are the best social bookmarking sites to use for getting backlinks and what are your strategies?

We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!

We will open a new office at a new location and I would like to add it to our Google places. How do I do this?  Per Google guidelines: "Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts."  - Website & Phone: Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location_._ Do I have to another contact page on my website for that location too? I will end up having to business listing with the same name but different locations. I want people to know that we have 2 separate offices because they serve different clients. I want to show up in Google places for the second location as well. Any thoughts?

What would be the best Title of your Homepage if your top 3 keywords would be: taxi service Seattle (5400 exact searches) Seatle taxi                 (4400 exact searches) Seattle taxi service (1900 exact searches) Would you go for all of them or just the one with more searches? I guess you can target them all on one page being almost the same but what is the best strategy to apply in this case to get the most out of it? Do you take into account the broad numbers of searches which are different from the exact numbers? Tools I used:Google sktool Thanks for reading!

I have started a long-term article marketing campaign and press release distribution. I will have about 4 articles and press releases in total every month. Although the press releases will not be self-promotional, sometimes they will be talking about a certain product that we unveil. The question is, due to the high quality of these press releases, should I put them on my website as well as publish them on third party websites? If so, because they target a specific service/product which we already have a dedicated page on our website, wouldn't that put Google in the position of choosing between the two pages? I was thinking to put them on my blog and link internally from there with the keywords that I target on those pages as anchor text. The same question for articles. Any suggestions?

We recently changed the template of our website but we kept the same url structure, most titles are the same, the content changed a little bit, the description is the same, and the same on-page SEO. Although we have been very careful and the actual template change took less than 5 minutes, we experienced a huge drop in rankings (even more than 10 positions in Google serp). Does anyone have any idea what could have caused such a drop? The weird thing is that Google still has the old website in cash and not the new one. We resubmitted the sitemap, made a few more redirects... but anyway... what else can we do? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Can I use the same video (hosted on my website, static URL) for 2 completely unique press releases/articles)? Would this make it less unique although the subject on those to press releases would fall into the same category (travel) but will have different content?

Does anybody recommend any book about content writing?

I am in a limo service industry where people are not looking for great content or product description, all they want is a nice Lincoln Town car and a competitive price. Because I need to get more pictures in front of my customers rather than more content I am not sure if by not having the content high up in the page will affect my rankings. We are transitioning to a new template where we have more control over the layout of the website but because of the slider that we have on the homepage the content needs to go further down.  We could insert some content in each of the slides but the page would start looking too "busy". We want the customers to see very clearly what we offer. They see the picture, click for more info and book the service. How important still is to have your keywords in the first hundred words on a certain webpage? Can we get away with having the content read by search engines after 3 - 4 slides and their description (about 20 words total) ?

If you have only one SEO guy doing link building for you, 6-8 hours a day,with a budget of $1000 -$2000 what would be the best 5 things to concentrate on?
Based on personal experience, could anybody suggest a daily/weekly plan?

See example: car rental - sedans - bmw car rental - sedans - audi car rental - sedans - ford (internal links to sedans - audi, ford) or (internal links to suv - bmw) car rental - suv - bmw car rental - suv - audi car rental - suv - ford (internal links to suv- audi, ford) or (internal links to sedans- bmw...) Should I cross link only between the product page under each category or can I link between different products under different categories? From a user point of view, I think it will give him more options if he wants to choose the same brand but a bigger vehicle although I have read numerous posts saying that we should be internally linking most of the time within the same category. User experience  or SEO?

Is it true that the shorter the Title tag is the more powerful the keywords in it are?
I know that the main keywords have to be at the beginning of the title but, having more words in your Title could dilute the effectiveness of your main keywords? Ex: Dallas limo service | Private car by SelectLimousine. Could  the fact that I have a second part of my title  affect the first part by diluting its value? I would like to rank first for Dallas car service but also for Dallas car service and Dallas limousine service. Is this good practice?

Did anybody have any success with Hotbot listing?

Hello guys! We are in process of buying a new domain. How can we be sure that this domain is not blacklisted and are there any steps to take in order to be sure that whatever we are buying is actually in "good shape"? Thanks much!