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Nothing is ever random with Google (unless it's a bug). I think those pages are ordered by how important Google sees them, meaning if a particular services page is a more searched term Google will weigh that higher than say your main services page.

Also if people seem to flow through your site a certain way and end up on certain pages more often than not Google will use that to show relevant site links. For example Google will make out when someone is looking for lawyer that they might be interested in your contact details and office location.

From my experience Google uses the manually input categories in conjunction with other listing data. I would select carpet cleaners and floor care (if they have that) and then in the about section use some anchor text going back to individual service pages,

eg. We provide

Carpet cleaning (link to carpet cleaning page) and other floor care related services.

Also make sure to get your other listings in order and use https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Carpet Cleaning Service for getting your categories consistent.

Yes, I think Moz needs to refresh those duplicate requests emails, meaning Factual switched the way they get their data. Factual used to allow people to email them and request fixes.

Other companies use data from partners and Moz probably hasn't updated those emails since they launched Moz local.

Factual uses Moz (as a data partner), so paying for Moz local should fix it (anywhere from a month to 6 mths).

Since subdomains are essentially different websites it makes sense to have separate site maps for each. This will become evident once you start looking into using Google analytics and webmaster tools as sub domains get treated like individual sites.

Here's one thought to start the quest. ID if the migration was done correctly.

eg If you had a site that was example.com/mens did the 301 look like newsite.com/mens? If not then you might be having tons of issues with a bad planned migration.

404s are not founds which are fine if they are really not found and there isn't a different url to point the original page to. One big issue could be that during the migration the old pages weren't 301'd which would result in tons of 404s.

Go through the 404s and see if they are issues or just relics from old data. Then you can mark in fixed in WMTs.

Hope that helps

I'd add that at times Google may even start to rank a different page on the same domain with all things staying equal. I've seen clients web pages drop off and other get picked up for a KW we were tracking/trying to rank better for.

Here's a necessary step to take to get a verified check mark next to your website URL on Google Plus. This is especially important if you're a local business.

https://support.google.com/business/answer/4569085?hl=en

Rankings can be improved within a short while (2 months isn't a stretch) and good links are still king. There just isn't a better way at the moment for Google to figure out if one page is superior to another without relying on them as a huge signal. You can add all the content you want but without links your site will stand still or you might get the occasional long tailed search from an organic visit.

I say do the basics before you try anything to difficult. Get your KWs figured out, and apply them in the appropriate format. Ranking a page for more than two keywords and their slight variants has proven super difficult and I'd almost go as far as saying that going beyond two per page is unrealistic. Once you know your KWs then apply SEO onsite best practices, use Mozs on page grader if you have questions about best practices. also don't forget about internal linking as you're optimizing pages.

I don't have a scientific answer but I do have one based off personal experience and knowledge.

1. The page title is used for ranking purposes and having a brand appended to every title tag actually results in page titles where Google decides to display the brand first and then the keywords which often times get cut off. So your title can be Bubble Gum 72 oz | Target and Google can/does display it as Target : Bubble Gum 72 oz, now imagine the same scenario with a longer brand name and all the sudden Google is cutting off the keywords/ click worthy title.

2. I think that unless you're a very dominate player in a certain industry your brand name doesn't help, even with that said smaller less "authoritative" brands can out rank older brand by just being a better player in the internet marketing game. Consider your audience, is the brand making them click the page because every other brand is spammy/crap or is the brand not adding value?

I expect that you'll get very similar answers to mine from other here. What I would recommend is removing the brand from the title on decent traffic page (not your best but not your worst) and run a test, see if the brand in title does anything.

Lastly, if you need to have the brand and it's causing issues just throw it into the meta description.

Basically a web page has to be crawlable. If an engine can't crawl it than you don't exist. SEO 101, use html for all text. Google has made strides to try to understand what sites are about but to keep it easy for crawlers use html.

As for a tool you can use googles adwords tool and add the url into "landing page" and see how some of the site gets crawled by a simple bot. You can also look at google cached versions of sites and look at the "text only" options, that should give you a good view of what the crawlers see.

Hope that helps.

I don't have a scientific answer but I do have one based off personal experience and knowledge.

1. The page title is used for ranking purposes and having a brand appended to every title tag actually results in page titles where Google decides to display the brand first and then the keywords which often times get cut off. So your title can be Bubble Gum 72 oz | Target and Google can/does display it as Target : Bubble Gum 72 oz, now imagine the same scenario with a longer brand name and all the sudden Google is cutting off the keywords/ click worthy title.

2. I think that unless you're a very dominate player in a certain industry your brand name doesn't help, even with that said smaller less "authoritative" brands can out rank older brand by just being a better player in the internet marketing game. Consider your audience, is the brand making them click the page because every other brand is spammy/crap or is the brand not adding value?

I expect that you'll get very similar answers to mine from other here. What I would recommend is removing the brand from the title on decent traffic page (not your best but not your worst) and run a test, see if the brand in title does anything.

Lastly, if you need to have the brand and it's causing issues just throw it into the meta description.

There definitely can be a issue with you ranking for the content you wrote. Basically if your site has a DA and PR that's worse than those other sites those other site will probably get the traffic you're trying to get. However if this is done many times and you're getting links back your link profile is getting built up and in return your site is bearing more weight.There's also the duplicate content issue which I don't think is a big deal if it's on another domain. There are  just too many little nuisances that need to be looked at before making bold claims about the effects of what you laid out above.

Without doing any research my bet is luxury dog clothes has far less search volume than designer dog clothes. So the site you're talking about decided that they don't want to chase the words with less volume which makes sense. Also Google is smart enough to make the connection between designer and luxury. You usually don't want to worry too much about long tail keywords as those have low volume searches and don't make economic sense to optimize pages for something that get searched rarely. What does make sense is getting a high ranking for decent traffic KW and then blogging or something to capture the long tail words.

Hope that makes your understanding a bit better.

OCring it should make it crawlable so that should create search engine benefit. What you could try is using some of the content as a lead generation piece. So you know all those sites that will give you well written white pages if you give them an email? You could do the same, so maybe have the best content released only after an email is produced.

Honda Parts | Brand (Honda of Africa) would be just fine. Because if you look at SERPs Google has been able to separate the brand from the title, and at times even flips the result to show brand first. eg. Honda of Africa: Honda Parts.

Also Kevin mentioned that you might use Chevy, however if that terms volume is minuscule than you might not be helping yourself.

From my experience Google uses the manually input categories in conjunction with other listing data. I would select carpet cleaners and floor care (if they have that) and then in the about section use some anchor text going back to individual service pages,

eg. We provide

Carpet cleaning (link to carpet cleaning page) and other floor care related services.

Also make sure to get your other listings in order and use https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Carpet Cleaning Service for getting your categories consistent.

404s are not founds which are fine if they are really not found and there isn't a different url to point the original page to. One big issue could be that during the migration the old pages weren't 301'd which would result in tons of 404s.

Go through the 404s and see if they are issues or just relics from old data. Then you can mark in fixed in WMTs.

Hope that helps

Hosting is an interesting thing. Most local hosting services are better because they provide some "service" but the reality is they usually cost more just because they don't have economies of scale. From a localized standpoint having a "local" host really doesn't affect rankings.

Nothing is ever random with Google (unless it's a bug). I think those pages are ordered by how important Google sees them, meaning if a particular services page is a more searched term Google will weigh that higher than say your main services page.

Also if people seem to flow through your site a certain way and end up on certain pages more often than not Google will use that to show relevant site links. For example Google will make out when someone is looking for lawyer that they might be interested in your contact details and office location.