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I have never seen this before, but I recently took over a client that for all intents and purposes is considered to be in Metro A. They're just south of the border and everyone (customers, etc.) consider them in Metro A. The problem is their physical address puts them in Small Town B. For whatever reason, this client has decided that they are going to put their address as follows: Street 
Metro A, Zip Code Small Town B They've mismatched the city and zip code in attempts to have a stronger showing in Metro A organically. I've never seen this strategy before, my gut tells me bad, bad, bad. So I'm looking for a better strategy, advice, etc.

This could be all inclusive of both Google and Bing (a la webmaster tools), or, add more specificity with two additional categories:
"Google Webmaster Tools"
"Bing Webmaster Tools" (It was suggested I post this on the forum and see if anyone else would upvote this.) Thanks! D7s6zJm

Taking a long, Ace-Ventura-like breath here. This question is loaded. Here we go: No manual actions reported against my client's site in GWT HOWEVER, a link: operator search for external links to my client's website shows NO links in results. That seems like a very bad omen to me. OSE shows 13 linking domains, but not the one that's listed in the next bullet point. Issue: In Google Webmaster Tools, I noticed 1,000+ external links to my client's website all coming from riddim-donmagazine.com (there are a small handful of other domains listed, but this one stuck out for the large quantity of links coming from this domain) Those external links all point to two URLs on my client's website. I have no knowledge of any campaigns run by client that would use this other domain (or any schemes for that matter) It appears that this website riddim-donmagazine.com has been suspended by hostgator All of the links were first discovered last year (dates vary but basically August through December 2013) There have not been any newly discovered links from this website reported by GWT since those 2013 dates All of the external links are /? based. Example: http://riddim-donmagazine.com/?author=1&paged=31 If I run that link in preceding bullet point through http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php, or any others from riddim-donmagazine.com those external links return 302 status. My best guess is at one time the client was running an advertising program and this website may have been on that network. One of the external links points to an ad page on the client's website.
(web.archive.org confirms this is a WordPress site and that it's coverage of Bronx news could trigger an ad for my client or make it related to my client's website when it comes to demographics.) Believe me, this externally linked domain is only a small problem in comparison with the rest of my client's issues (mainly they've changed domains, then they changed website vendors, etc., etc.), but I did want to ask about that one externally linked domain. Whew.Thanks in advance for insights/thoughts/advice!

Recently one of our clients switched web providers. We've been implementing 301 redirects to the new URL structure for the most important pages. We noticed upon doing a site search, Google has indexed a .swf URL on page 3 of search results. Please see attached image. 1. Should I implement a redirect for this? There are no links to this filetype.
2. There are three others (.swf) that are indexed I would think the best thing to do is to have the new website return a 404 for this page, as it's currently doing, and it will eventually drop out of the index. Any other suggestions? Thanks! g2tur4r

Hi All, Recently we were given the option to choose from two custom urls for a car dealership's G+ page:
+brandname
+locationdealershipbrand Made up example:
+scottford
+nyford My gut tells me to choose the +brandname option, but curious to see if anyone had any other input about how the "location + dealership brand" custom url choice could impact local search results, if at all. (I was surprised that it even came up as an option because to me it echoes EMDs...) Thoughts? Thanks!

Beta version has been out for awhile. Curious to know what people think of Moz Analytics. Personally, I'm having a hard time making the switch from Pro to Moz Analytics because I'm so used to the navigation and layout of Pro. What does everyone else think of the new Moz Analytics? Advantages? Disadvantages?

Hi Mozzers, My company recently took over a website for a client and moved them onto our CMS. We are having some issues right now with sitelinks. A few things have happened to cause this: 1. Our IT department didn't put in the proper 301 redirects from their old subdirectory pages to the new corresponding subdirectory pages. (Insert head smack here.) 2. In addition to taking over the client's desktop domain, we've also taken over the client's mobile site. The mobile site has changed from m.domain.com to www.domain.mobi. Again, there was a missing 301 between the two (head smacking ensues). As a result, Google has selected the following pesky sitelink for one of the sitelinks returned during a brand search for the client. The brand search is returning a sitelink under www.domain.com as:
IIS7 IIS7 When you click on the sitelink for IIS7, it's a link to m.domain.com which NOW redirects to www.domain.mobi. My question is how long until the IIS7 sitelink goes away and is there anything we can do to speed it up? What we've been doing to fix this: 1. Demoting sitelinks in GWT for www.domain.com that have the old subdirectory structure while the 301 redirects are being implemented. I can't demote this m.domain.com as a sitelink for www.domain.com because it's a different subdomain, and GWT will only allow me to demote subfolder pages or the www.domain.com itself 2. We've verified m.domain.com and demoted its homepage as a sitelink. Still not sure how this could stop it from showing up for a brand search that returns www.domain.com Thanks in advance!

I know we can subscribe to Q&A's for updates, but is there any bookmarking type option within the Moz Community Q&A so I can star or favorite my questions in one area? Often I come across really great ideas/solutions in the Q&A, and it would be wonderful to quickly access all of my favorite q's/discussions in one area for later. Thanks mucho.

Example of setup:
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com). I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap. 1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol? 2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer. 3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap. Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done. Thanks!

We currently have a custom 404 page set up for our clients, but the developer has it returning a HTTP 200 for the status code. Big no, no. I'm having that fixed right now. My question is, currently, the custom 404 page is only returned for urls with the extension .aspx: For example : ilovepizza.com/pepperni.aspx would return a 404 page because the correct page is ilovepizza.com/pepperoni.aspx Any other format of URL without the extension (example ilovepizza.com/thumbtack) does not trigger the custom 404 page we've created, but it does trigger a server error with a 404 HTTP status page. I want to change this so this type of error also triggers the custom 404 page because it's more user-friendly and would return them to the website. My question: Is there any benefit to making the /thumbtack errors return the custom 404 page but with a 400 Bad Request HTTP Status? Kind of a novice here in those aspects, but does the 400 Bad Request status indicate that it was a user mistake and not a mistake created on the website? Other suggestions?

Based on this answer from Google, http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750 you can't use the product schema if a customer has to make the purchase offline or at another retailer. Does anyone know why they set it up this way? Has anyone ever tried to use product markup on a website when the product is purchased offline? Also, is there another solution or another markup that would apply? Thanks!

Hi Mozzers, I hope I'm not asking in the wrong area, but I'll be at the SXSW Interactive this weekend, and was wondering if any other Mozzers were going to be there? It would be great to meet up if so. Also, if there's a better community spot for me to post questions like this in the future, please let me know. Thanks!

Noob question. I'm using Open Site Explorer to hunt down some external links for a website. In the attached image (post-pressing the filter button), it says I have 889 external links, but after I've downloaded the CSV, I only get 695 links. Why the difference in number? And if I'm doing something wrong, how do I make sure I'm getting the full amount of external links to my client's website? Thanks! GG6wURf.jpg

Has anyone come across any great guides to pair with client data to help you determine if their website has been penalized? I'm also not talking about an obvious drop in traffic/rankings, but I want to know if there's a guide out there for detecting the subtleties that may be found in a client's website data. One that also helps you take into account all the different variables that may not be related to the engines. Thanks!

I want to know if it's possible to add a canonical tag to a URL that points to a URL under a different folder. Content is just about the same. Here's an example (fake urls and product, but structure and parameters are similar to my client's website): domain.com/toy-ducks-results.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis domain.com/toy-ducks-details.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis&style=Sparkly Let's say that my purple Elvis ducks are really popular. Is there any harm in putting a rel=canonical on the Sparkly Elvis ducks page to the purple Elvis ducks page? Even though they are two different folders? /toy-ducks-results and /toy-ducks-details So, in effect, the preferred folder is /toy-ducks-results Thanks in advance for any help.

Is there any harm in using javascript so a user can "toggle" open or closed additional text on a website? For example, if a user wants to read more about something, they can click on "More Info" and the text would then appear. Google is able to read the text, because I chose a random 8 word section of the text within the More Info and pasted it into a Google Search and the website showed up in search results. Just wondering if using this technique would have any negative impact. Here's what the code would look like: 
<a <span="">title</a><a <span="">="Show Tables" href="</a><a class=" " target="_blank">javascript:toggleDisplay('table1')</a>">More Info style="display: none;" id="table1"> this is where the text would be, and from this section was where I grabbed text to search with in google. Then in the footer, here is the script needed so the more info will work: I am by no means an expert in coding/html/javascript. Thanks!

Prepare yourselves. This is a long question. With the rise of schema and Google Local+, do you think Google will now have enough data about where a business is located, so that when someone searches for, a keyword such as "Atlanta Hyundai dealers" a business in Atlanta that's website: has been properly marked up with schema (or microdata for business location) has claimed its Google Local+ has done enough downstream work in Local Search listings for its NAP (name, address, phone number) will no longer have to incorporate variations of "Atlanta Hyundai dealers" in the text on the website? Could they just write enough great content about how they're a Hyundai dealership without the abuse of the Atlanta portion? Or if they're in Boston and they're a dentist or lawyer, could the content be just about the services they provided without so much emphasis tied to location? I'm talking about removing the location of the business from the text in all places other than the schema markup or the contact page on the website. Maybe still keep a main location in the title tags or meta description if it would benefit the customer. I work in an industry where location + keywords has reached such a point of saturation, that it makes the text on the website read very poorly, and I'd like to learn more about alternate methods to keep the text more pure, read better and still achieve the same success when it comes to local search. Also, I haven't seen other sites penalized for all the location stuffing on their websites, which is bizarre because it reads so spammy you can't recognize where the geotargeted keywords end and where the regular text begins. I've been working gradually in this general direction (more emphasis on NAP, researching schema, and vastly improving the content on clients' websites so it's not so heavy with geo-targeted keywords). I also ask because though the niche I work in is still pretty hell-bent on using geo-targeted keywords, whenever I check Analytics, the majority of traffic is branded and geo-targeted keywords make up only a small fraction of traffic. Any thoughts? What are other people doing in this regard?

I've been going through my monthly reports, and noticed something odd in the SEO Moz report section showing the visits from organic (non-paid) search engine results. When checking this data against the same data in Google Analytics, everything for the most part seems to line up with the exception of two dates: Jan 09 and Jan 23 of the SEO Moz report show 0 visits, but Analytics shows I do have visits on those days. Any ideas why this would be in the report or what I'm missing? IsePEAS hWBASOd

We're about to delete a bunch of unnecessary pages, largely responsible for our duplicate content woes. These are low traffic pages, and they were NEVER a good user experience. I just want to check and make sure I'll be setting up the proper way to account for their absence: 1. Set up 301's for all of them so they point to related pages 2. Remove them from the Sitemap 3. Also remove any internal links that previously pointed at them. Is there anything else I'm missing here? Or any additional moves I can make that I'm not thinking about? Thanks!