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I have a client where we put the specific local listing page url (example.com/locations/phoenix/location1) in the Google Places URL field. It works out really well as we get the home page ranking organically (depending on the query) and the specific places result locally. Sometimes they are combined and other times they are not, but we are in the mix somewhere almost always.
That is possible but the links could be helping them. I would wait to disavow until its actually a problem. you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot.
I have had something similar done to my site. One of my competitors "targeted" our business for negative SEO. I noticed a bunch of spammy links pointing to our site with outright X-rated / vile anchor text. The good news is that we haven't seen a drop in traffic or rankings and it's been going on for a while now. Google is pretty good a catching things like this. If you are doing "white hat" SEO and marketing, you probably don't need to worry about it.
In my experience, I had a client with the positioning like yours. We created the Places account and it just went into the local / maps results. The good news was that the SERP didn't contain any other organic listings at the top. If you have prominent and consistent rankings and are confident in your strategy, then you might not need to create a places account. Just be aware that moving down 1 spot could really be 8 or 9 spots on the real estate of the SERP. Moving down to #2 organically could mean being below the entire local results. You will need to judge the risk / rewards. Hope that helps.
Google has always changed title in the SERPs to what they think is best. In some cases, it can be a total nightmare. Search Engine Land posted this article yesterday on this exact same issue with two different companies: http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819
Hopefully, Google will allow webmaster more control over their listings in the SERPs!
There are a couple of options for site owners in your situation. The first option is to create a 301 redirect from the "duplicate" page to the "preferred" page. This will eliminate that extra URL and forward it to the preferred one. If that's not possible for whatever reason, you can specify the rel canonical tag in your head section which basically tells search bots to prefer the page you specify in that tag. Here is info on rel canonical: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
You can post a job on Inbound.org for $50 for 30 days. Typically, higher caliber and quality experts will view the jobs on this site. http://www.inbound.org/jobs
You can also try Odesk or Elance but the results there can definitely vary.
Having a blog is definitely a smart idea. Even though you are using Open Cart, you can just create a subfolder on your host called 'blog' and run WordPress out of there. This way, your main Ecommerce site will be on example.com and your blog will be on example.com/blog. Google won't care that you're running two different CMSs. You are creating the content on your domain and as long as both CMSs are linking to each other then both your blog and Ecom site will gain benefit to any links.
Since Open Cart and WP are both open source, with the right development (or developer) you can actually tweak both systems enough to share the same template files, this way they look the same from a design standpoint. That's really another question in itself, but to summarize, yes, you should start your blog and definitely use wordpress for it if you are comfortable with it.
Personally, the only reason a pingback is useful for me is for the notification that someone is linking to me. When you "accept" the pingpack it displays it on the blog as if it were a comment. When you view the pingback in the comments on the post page it really doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't really have any value to the page or those looking at it. I typically just delete the pingback and go forward now knowing another site linked to me.
Also, there is the possibility that Google may crawl the link in your comments. In that case it will now look like a 2 way / reciprocal link, where there have been several cases that Google has discounted / devalued those types of links. Hope that helps.
Since people will not be able to visit the locations of your driver's addresses, I agree with you that you would not want to use that. Also, it will be a bad idea to setup home based service area businesses at your drivers' houses since they will essentially be able to control the listings you create. You will need to come up with some sort of space that is controlled and utilized by your business in those locations. It doesn't have to be a large space but it will have to be a unique address. Even though customers may never come to it, you'll still need to get it setup. Then, in Google places set the business up as a service area business with the appropriate areas that your drivers in that area can legitimately serve. Click the "hide address" box and you'll be good to go. You'll want to setup local phone numbers for each location as well.
Then you can create unique content around those other areas where you can do business directly on your website. Have localized content (services, reviews, phone number, etc) specific to each location. Set the URL for the places pages to those specific area locations on your website.
Edit: spelling and grammar
Definitely use the Yoast SEO plugin for anything regarding WordPress, it handles titles, meta, canonical URL, sitemaps, internal links, and much more.
As for themes, you're better off going with one of the premium providers, studiopress / Genesis framework which you mentioned it good as well as any of the Woothemes. These work well with the Yoast plugin. Themeforest themes may look nice but the code and development will be poor and not up to standard which will cause plugin conflicts and other theme issues.
You will typically get these errors when Googlebot is unable to access your site. This usually happens when your website is down for whatever reason. You might want to check your server logs or talk to your web host and see when your website was unavailable. If it is down often you may want to consider moving web hosts.
Definitely add the Room H and update it with all of the citations you currently have. Also, "S." and "South" are different and will throw off the consistency, same with "St." and "stree" or "suite" vs "ste" vs "#". Make sure you enter the same information everywhere.
"In summary, is it correct to say that H1 and H2 tags are stronger signals to the search bots of what the page is about?"
Absolutely. These tags are strong signals to search engines as to what the page is about, along with title tags and meta descriptions. You can prioritize content and break down the page with H1 through H6 headline tags. SEOmoz has a great on-page best practice guide for setting up the page, which makes sense for your users as well as search engines. Try not to spam keywords anywhere, just make sure it is "keyword friednly" but at the same time readable and would make sense to a human.
Categories should depict what your business is (e.g. Hospital), not what it does (e.g. Vaccinations) or products it sells (e.g. Sony products or printer paper). This information can be added in your description.
Although it does not say "don't add a location" to your categories, there still isn't a good reason to. Google is well aware of your location, so the only reason any SEO would put the location in the category would be to manipulate Google. Once you do that, your listing is going to suffer. Based on experience, do not add location to our client's category listings. And to be blunt, if you're working with a Local SEO who insists on adding it your category, you may want to explore other options.
There are 5 different categories you can associate your business with. Definitely use as many as you can from Google's pre selected categories. It is okay to come up with your own categories. Google's policy on this is to not add location based information to your categories. A good rule of thumb is to think of what your business is, not what it sells and use that as a category. You can use the additional info and description to mention what you sell.
To make it short, it's okay to use custom categories, just don't spam them for city name + keywords.
If I were you, I would completely get rid of the richardson-tx out of your URLs. The only reason why you would do this is for Google. It makes no sense for the user to have this in the URL, so you should get rid of it.
I would keep your URLs short:
/services/cosmetic-dentistry
/services/cosmetic-dentistry/teeth-whitening
There are local signals that you can do on page besides your URL that will benefit Google and users. For example:
These will get you further down the local path than manipulating your URLs to contain many keywords, which doesn't make sense for the users.
You can and should include both if you are able to. You are not limited to using one element of schema.org on any page. It's helpful for Google and other search engines to better categorize and understand the elements of your page. If you have a video on a page with a description written by a particular author, then definitely include both. As to how that page will show up in SERPs is Google's call, which will depend on the query.
What's the URL to your site? I do not see one posted above.
In short, domain authority is calculated from the authority of the domains that link to you. If a 49 DA is inadequate for your ranking then you will need to chase links from domains who have much higher DA than who are linking to you now. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority
Matt Cutts did a video on this exact issue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8
Generally, you should just stick to either underscores or hyphens and not mix the two.
If you want to change all of the underscores to hyphens then make sure you 301 redirect all of the old urls to the new ones. This can be a total pain if your site is huge, but would be necessary if you change the URLs.
Woothemes have very well designed and built themes right out of the box. They integrate well with SEO plugins as well. They do have a written documentation and a support forum where users and the developers will answer questions you have.
You might want to post your jobs on Inbound.org. I'm sure you can find amazing talent through there.
It also might be a good idea for you to place these links in context in the footer.
"This site is in association with...."
Also, if the sites are on the same IP address or C block then Google will probably figure out that there is a real relationship between the sites and the people who run them.
Also, put those links in your Google+ profile. That's another good way to give Google the signal that there is a relationship. If you're not trying to manipulate or deceive anyone or Googlebot you shouldn't have much to worry about.
Since you fixed your robots.txt file you should be good to. It will probably take a few days for Google to recrawl your site and update the index with the URLs they are now allow to crawl.
Blocked URLs can still show up in SERPs if you haven't defined the no-index attribute in your section.
To add to Devanur's comment, there is a small amount of link juice leaked when passed through a 301.
I am familiar with your industry but is there some connection between what people you market toward actually do on Thursday and Friday? I notice that my weekend traffic is the worst on Sat and Sunday, because my target market is enjoying their weekend and not working, surfing the web. Since it is consistent I am thinking that it is something related to your market.
There are a ton of things you can do. Some of my favorites:
Optimize the page speed to load as quick as possibly. Good plugin: W3 Total Cache, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
Setup your theme and templates to use structured data in the HTML. This will tell Google specifically what your pages and products are best categorized as. http://schema.org. You can use this especially for product reviews which may show up as rich snippets in the search results.
Setup Google Authorship (rel=author) and/or Google Publisher tags for your blog posts and or/pages
Change your permalink structure to %postname%
Use the Redirection plugin to track your 404s, 301s, and other typical server response codes: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Yoast has an Analytics plugin with many customization options for tracking
There is obviously a lot you can do since WP is an open source platform. These should get you started and busy for a while!
Ok cool. I think what you are referring to are links that are redirected to a URL via JS. The case you have is clearly not, since
is a traditional text link, it is just being hidden by JavaScript to incorporate the design of your page.
It is against the Google Places guidelines to setup a Google+ Local page if you are not a business owner or representative of that business. They may never approve the listing.
Places / +Local listings are meant to give the user / searcher direct access to the business, not their affiliates or advertisers.
If you want to promote your clients' businesses then you should help them get it setup under their own accounts with all of their direct information.
There are ways to market local businesses online but in my opinion (and I' pretty sure Google's) a inauthentic Places page is not the answer.
Google can definitely see and crawl that link. It will be up to them whether it passes page rank or is indexed based on whether or not they think the link is deceptive to users or manipulative to Googlebot. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
I just did that search and I am seeing you right at the #6 spot. Since you have tried incognito I am wondering if Google is demoting your result based on geographical location.
Have you tried searching from a proxy or other service like https://startpage.com/ that strips your IP? You can narrow it down that way. Definitely odd but the good news is that I can see you right there.
If the 3rd party will allow for it, then this is definitely recommended. Most local search platforms do this (Yelp, YP, etc). But if the 3rd party will not allow you to markup your NAP on your own, just having the data consistent will be beneficial to you.
If you are referring to the star rating (or with Google+ Local - the new 30 point rating), then Google will only display these reviews if they were left on the Google Places page. This became fact about a year or two ago when Google showed reviews on the places page from other sources.
In order to get a star rating, customers must leave reviews on the Google places page or Google+ Local profile. This will actually be to the client's benefit as Google looks at the number/quality of reviews on the Places page as a ranking factor.
I have had experience with all three.
To answer your question, I think Localeze is the best for distributing your NAP, however, there is no substitute for or better value than manually claiming local citations. It also takes awhile for the listing to get distributed across of their local search platforms.
In my opinion, Yext is overpriced, but is valuable in claiming major citation sources. The number of profiles available are capped. David Mihm recently posted on this: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/yext-local-marketing/
UBL is good, but I only spend the $39 core syndication annually since they have access to the Acxiom database.
In short, you can pay for all three, but don't just set it and leave it. Always claim and manage as many citations as you can manually. You can take advantage of all of the local search platform's features without overlooking anything.
You are already on the right start in explaining Google's Terms of Service. The DA is important to look at for advertising (it will give you an idea with how much link equity you can get from a site, or how popular a domain is), but if you are advertising in accordance with Google T&Cs, then all links you receive will be nofollowed. This makes DA and PA not the best metrics to look at.
If you're running Ads, you'll want to look at how many visitors the site receives, how loyal those visitors are, how long they spend on the page, and how likely they are to click on a sponsored link. The webmasters' analytics will show all of this, which they should be willing to share if they are going to charge big bucks.
If you are going to 301 your niche/micro domains over to the main one, make sure you let Google know that you have moved the domain in Webmaster Tools.
Google says to 301 all pages to their new corresponding pages.
If your niche sites were structured like your main site, but those sites were penalized by Google, then you will probably experience the same effect with the 301s. Google won't penalize you simply for the fact that you have more links to deeper pages than your homepage, they'll penalize you because the links you are acquiring are spammy in nature.
There isn't any way you can get a finite list of everything they are optimizing for short of asking them, however, there are a few methods you can use to get a pretty good idea (assuming they are optimizing their site with best practices). -Check the title tag of their home page and main content pages. Look at other onsite factors, such as keywords in their headings tags (h1, h2, etc), bold text, and internal anchor text. -Although it isn't relevant to ranking- check the keywords meta tag. Some still stuff keywords in there! -Use Open Site Explorer to check the anchor text of their incoming links I wouldn't get too focused on your competitors though. Although it is good to keep an eye on them, you should spend your time building a community, creating good content, and optimizing for keyword friendly content that will help your users. Sometimes it's easy to get lost in what others are doing, when you should be focusing on building the quality of your site with best practices. Hope this helps!
Although the filename will be duplicate, the content on those filenames will be okay. Google will look more at the content on the page rather than anything else. There are sites out there that have weird file structures, like:
/index.php
/services/index.php
/products/index.php
Some CMS's will automatically do this, but they rank fine because they have quality content, even though the index.php is technically a duplicate filename.
You should be fine with this method.
Ok gotcha- well if that is the case, then think about how the user will navigate to the end result if they started from the home page. Logically, you could assume the following
If URL structure is as follows:
www.lawyerz.com/office-locations/dr-al-pacino
then /office-locations/ should contain links to all office locations of multiple lawyers.
But with this structure
www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/office-locations
/dr-al-pacino/ should contain links to the 4 other pages. **This option will probably be your best structure. **
Revisiting this - check out this Quora thread with some additional insight. http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Do-sub-domains-hurt-SEO
Is there any particular reason why office location, phone number, reviews, and ratings need to be on 4 separate pages? I could see there being a lot of thin content which won't really rank well or provide a ton of user value. Can you give some more info as to why this would be? I could easily see all 4 of these pages combined into one.
With that, you can focus your URL structure into categories or local regions or both, depending on how dynamic you want the site to be. For example:
http://www.lawyerz.com/nevada/personal-injury/dr-al-pacino
OR
http://www.lawyerz.com/personal-injury/dr-al-pacino
OR
http://www.lawyerz.com/nevada/dr-al-pacino
Unless there is something that I missing, I think no matter how you structure your URLs, thin content just won't rank.
I would think that buying AdWords for your brand name would be a good/affordable solution until you outrank that video. Benefits are:
It might be a good idea for your client to get good reviews in video format. Have them contact their past customers who are happy and would be willing to review them on camera. Post these video testimonials on YouTube and embed them on the client website.
You can also have the company create an "Brand Name - About Us" video which gives insight into the company for prospects. Explain how they do business and why they are best choice over their competition. You can also ask questions in the video and encourage watchers to comment.
If these videos you create have more interaction and more popularity than the other negative video, and is relevant for the same search terms (Brand Name) then that negative video will probably drop off the first page of organic / universal results.
You are right in that you would be better off having your blog in sub-directory rather than in a sub-domain.
Sub-domains are very close to being considered the equivalent of a new root domain. For example, Wordpress.com and Blogspot.com blogs come automatically registered with a new subdomain. There are hundreds of thousands of these blogs, but only a few actually have any authority despite the authority of their root domain.
When you create content on your blog in a sub-directory, your inbound links to those posts will help the authority of the domain you are on. So links to www.example.com/blog will help you out much more than blog.example.com.
It really just depends on the content of those pages. If its simply just address and phone, no way! Good localized content will help for sure!
Right- I can see that. You can always remove it from your places account tho. The other profile will still have access to it, however. So make sure that they know any changes they make will overwrite anything you do.
Rent mailboxes / addresses from executive suites in that area. They usually cost $25 per month. Add on a phone number with the local area code as well if possible. Don't use Google voice. Have all of the mail and phones forward to your main phone and address.
Create Google Places profiles for each using these addresses. Optimize them with unique business information. Verify these profiles via phone or address. (Most likely address) For the URL for the profiles, have them go to specific pages (which is the next step).
Create dedicated pages for each location. Create optimized content for each. Use Schema.org or hCard to markup the addresses. Make it consistent with your Google Places page.
Create local citations in local search platforms and local directories for all of your locations. Make sure the business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent with the ones you've purchased. Use distribution services and citation checkers like Localeze and GetListed. Get reviews to your Google places page. LEGITIMATE REVIEWS!
I have done this successfully with two clients now. Penguin won't really let you rank for them now organically, but locally you definitely have a shot.
The best way will be to ask for the login to the places account. You can however, claim the profile under your account as well.
Login to Places. From your dashboard, click "Add Another Business" in the top right corner. It will bring you to a page where you can enter the business phone number. Direct link here: http://www.google.com/local/add/g?hl=en-US&gl=US#phonelookup
If the Places page is already claimed, then the business should show up. Select the business you want, fill out the information, and then PIN verify the business. Once verified, it will show up in your Places account.
1. It really depends on your site. I usually send it to the home page if it's a local site with 5-20 pages.
2. If the links are in the same category, the only downfall would be that pagerank is split up to your two different pages. It's good for users and crawlers though.
3. Stick to high quality directories (dir.yahoo.com, botw.org, business.com), you'll spend more, but it will be worth it. Combine them with some niche directories and natural link building and you should be ranking with little problem on a moderately competitive keyword.