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Use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl the site. You'll be able to see the response codes from each page and the redirected URL's. A temporary redirect will have a 302 status code.

I've been running my agency from a home office for the last 14 years. Those on my team all work remotely, and it works out well.  With a digital agency, there isn't much that you can do in an office that you can't do remotely. I'm very spoiled, so it would take a lot to get me to commute to an office every day. On the other hand, I like to attend networking events and conferences to keep from becoming a total recluse.

Of course, there's a downside to working from home. I don't recommend it if you're an extrovert, which I'm not. I don't recommend it if you can't manage your time and resist distractions. You also have to be able to resist the urge to work all the time.

All of the SEO tools out there are wonderful, including Moz Analytics, but no tool can take the place of a solid understanding of SEO concepts and best practices.  Furthermore, if you use tools, you need to understand their limitations.

Regarding backlinks, I don't think there is a tool out there that can tell you 100% of the backlinks to your site. Even Google Search Console won't tell you all of them. If the tool doesn't show the backlinks, that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't there.

As awesome as many SEO tools are, they can't tell you exactly what to do to improve your site's performance in organic search. For that, you have to put in the work and educate yourself about the underlying concepts that each tool is designed around. Or you need to hire someone with that expertise.

If you post your URL in the Moz Q & A with specific questions, you're likely to get some practical help.

Moz Analytics is wonderful, but I haven't seen a tool out there that gives you the complete picture when it comes to auditing your site and competitive analysis. This is especially true when it comes to SEO.  Nothing can replace a comprehensive SEO audit and analysis conducted by an SEO expert.

Having said that, you'll probably get better help here if you share the URL,  your relevant keywords, the metrics you are comparing, and what you've done already to win in local search. By the way, when talking about "local search" are you talking about local map results or local organic results?

You may find that some website owners will question your motives and be suspicious if you are asking them to replace an existing link to a high authority site like Wikipedia. You might see better results if you suggest the link as an additional resource that supports what they already have.

This is definitely a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines, and I would certainly consider it a black hat tactic. You risk doing more harm than good.

This is what Google has to say about it here:

It's a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines to redirect a user to a different page with the intent to display content other than what was made available to the search engine crawler.

It looks like you are set up with the Magento shopping cart. There have been several other threads addressing the same issue. You may find some useful information there.

http://moz.com/community/q/temporary-redirects-on-magento

http://moz.com/community/q/magento-302-error-needs-to-be-301-http-to-https

http://moz.com/community/q/magento-1675-302-redirects-how-to-fix

If that doesn't help, I would recommend contacting Magento support.

What Dirk says is right, but there are ways to improve authority. Make sure you have a link on all of the new subsite pages to its corresponding "home" page.  You'll also want to update any backlinks that pointed to the old home pages to point to the new subpage.

Yes, this is a duplicate problem when it comes to SEO. This is an issue for two reasons:

1. Search engines see these as two different URLs even though they point to the same page. They probably understand that it's the same page but not necessarily. The correct way to handle this would be to 301-redirect http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/. (If your designer doesn't know how to do this, you need a new web designer.)

2. This is also a problem because any backlinks may be split between the two URLs even though they are the same page. This will be fixed by the 301-redirect as well.

If you haven't done so already, perform an audit of the old site's backlink profile. You don't want to inherit any risky backlinks when you create the redirects. A backlink audit will also help you find any old URLs on the site that also need to be redirected to pass on the link equity to your site.

If you aren't ready to redirect the pages yet because you don't want customers to be blindsided by the switch, you can use canonical tags to canonicalize each page to the counterpart on the main website. That way, users will see the old page, but Google will begin to associate the old site with the new (and the old brand with the new brand). I've done this before when rebranding a business and moving it from one website to another, and it worked beautifully.

Once you are ready to redirect all the pages to their counterparts on the main website, you can point the old domain to the main domain so any URLs automatically redirect to your domain. Set up a custom 404 page with useful navigation and maybe a search feature to help visitors find what they need.  Keep an eye on your server logs and Google Search Console for any 404s so that you can redirect any pages that haven't already been redirected to the appropriate pages.

Adding a cross-domain canonical tag like this is fine assuming you are doing it for customer service (and the manufacturer doesn't mind you copying content from their site). You won't see any SEO benefit from the content on those pages because they are unlikely to be indexed. On the other hand, it wouldn't hurt your site either.

There is no one specific radius for local results. It depends on the type of business and the query itself. For example, someone searching for a gas station probably needs the nearest one, but that's not necessarily true for someone searching for an attorney.  The result radius can also be affected by modifiers like "near me" or "in my area." The intent is slightly different than if you search for a query + city, state or even if you search for the query without a geo-modifier.  The device makes a difference as well. If you are on the go using your mobile phone, Google may assume you want the nearest location that's open now.

The best thing to do is search the specific queries in question with different modifiers and devices and see what kind of results you get.

I can't speak to the validity of the Moz report in your case, but you might want to try a different crawler like Screaming Frog and compare what you are seeing from Moz.

Local SEO is a different animal than organic SEO, but organic signals have played a much bigger part since the Pigeon update. External factors that affect your rankings in the local pack include business citations and reviews. Check out the 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors. Backlinks do have an effect on local search but probably not as much as they do on organic search.

Below are some great resources for local SEO:

• Mike Blumenthal
• David Mihm
• Andrew Shotland
• Phil Rosek 
• Local Search Forum (Linda Buquet)
• Whitespark (Darren Shaw, Nyagoslav Zhekov, et. al.)
• BrightLocal (Myles Anderson)

Assuming the plumber provides services at his customer's address, it would be considered a service area business (SAB). Consequently, you would need to add it to Google My Business with the "I serve customers at my business address" option.

While it's much more challenging to get an SAB in the local pack, there's a lot that can be done to improve organic performance for location-based queries.  Assuming you've covered your bases with on-page optimization, you'll want to focus on content and off-page optimization.

Add content with a local focus:

• Does the plumber belong to any local organizations like the chamber of commerce? Be sure to include those on the website.
• Is he active in any local charities or fundraising events? Include those in his bio.
• Are there any local laws or regulations that you can add content about on the site?
• Add case studies or testimonials that includes location-based content.
• Is there a way to add photos from the target city?

Off-page

• Try to get links from websites with a local focus in your area, including the local organizations, charities, etc mentioned above. Some old-fashioned local PR will help.
• There are quite a few local search directories that do not require a visible address.
• Develop a process to encourage customer reviews.

As I stated in response to your other question,  it's a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines to show Google a different website than what your users see. If you have legitimate reasons for redirecting users to different URLs, make sure that Google can crawl all versions. Then set up rel=alternate and rel=canonical tags to let Google know the relationship between different URLs, including the desktop version. See Google's guidelines about ho to handle separate URLs for the same content.

Google may use your meta description, or they may pull your meta description from the content on the page if it's more relevant to the query. That's why you see different descriptions for different queries. They may also be using the description from the Open Directory Project.

Here's a post from Dr. Pete that addresses the issue:

Why Won't Google Use My META Description?

Here's another Q&A that addresses the same issue:

http://moz.com/community/q/why-does-google-not-show-my-meta-descriptions-sometimes

Add additional locations through the Google My Business dashboard under the same Google account. It simplifies management of the listings and helps Google understand the relationship between locations.

These do appear to be contradictory guidelines until you understand what Google is trying to avoid here. Historically, SEOs have tried to rank businesses for geo-specific searches in areas other than where a business is located.

Let's say you run a gardening shop in Atlanta and you have an ecommerce side of the business online. Yes, you want to get walk-in traffic from the metro Atlanta area, but you also want to sell products online to customers all over the country. Ten years ago, you might set up 50 or so pages on your site with the exact same content with the city, state switched out. That way you could target keywords like the following:

• gardening supplies in Nashville, TN
• gardening supplies in Houston, TX
• gardening supplies in Seattle, WA
• gardening supplies in San Francisco, CA
• and so on...

That worked well 10 years ago, but the Panda update put a stop to that kind of nonsense.  Google understands that someone searching for "gardening supplies in Nashville, TN" is looking for a brick and mortar location in Nashville and not an ecommerce store.

If you have locations in each of those cities, you have a legitimate reason to target the above search queries. On the other hand, you don't want to incur the wrath of Google with duplicate content on your landing pages. That's why the best solution is to create unique content that will appeal to users in that location. Yes, this requires time and possibly money to implement, but it's worth it when customers are streaming through the door at each location.

Check out Bright Local's recent InsideLocal Webinar: Powerful Content Creation Ideas for Local Businesses. They discussed several companies that are doing a great job with local landing page content.

I would start with keyword research and come up with a large bank of alternatives for the "dog training" keyword. Look for synonyms, alternate word endings (train, trained, trainer), and co-occurrence terms. Then rewrite the content with these to be far more natural. It may require some heavy rewriting, depending on how bad it is.

Definitely get rid of the over-optimized footer links. If you do all of this, you shouldn't have to worry about the banner in the header. Header content is often the same across an entire site.

The hard part may be explaining to your client that on-page optimization isn't so much about exact-match keywords as it is about topical authority.

I doubt that a single sitewide reciprocal footer link is causing your site to be penalized.  There are dozens of possible reasons why your site is not ranking, and it's impossible to say what's going on without knowing the website in question.  If you don't want to post it here, send me the URL in a private message and I'll take a look.

• How long has your site been online?
• Has anyone conducted a link building campaign for you at any time? If so, what did they do?

Ugh. I can't really speak to your precise issue without the URL, but it's possible they are sacrificing increased sales and UX to aesthetics.  If they won't budge, you'll have to work harder to improve local search performance in other areas like off-site business citations and reviews.

That's the way it should work. When you set up a cross domain canonical from a URL on domain 1 to a URL on domain 2, you are telling the search engine that you want the content on site 2 to be indexed rather than the same content on site 1. The page content on domain 1 is probably not in the index for search results anymore, but the canonical tag ties the content on the two domains together.

In your example, does the search results link to the content on domain 2? That's what I would expect.

You are correct in your suspicion. If you canonicalize all of your color pages to the single page, that single page will probably be the only one to show up in search.

The internal duplication isn't really your biggest problem. The bigger problem is external duplicate content. You have the same or very similar product descriptions as other websites.  You can't compete with established websites selling the same products with the same product descriptions unless you have an aggressive and well-rounded digital marketing plan. Start by adding unique content to the product pages, which will help with both the internal and external duplicate content.

I also want to address your concern that the website will be penalized for duplicate content. There is no duplicate content "penalty."  Rather, when evaluating pages with duplicate content for a given search query, Google will choose the top page(s) to display in SERPs and filter out the rest.

Only a tiny fraction of the pages on your site are actually appearing in Google search results. A search of "site:vinylabs.com" only shows 5 pages in the results. You may have technical issues affecting indexability in addition to duplicate content.

Any chance you can share the URL? That would make it much easier for someone to help in this forum. Without the URL, I can offer a few diagnostic questions.

• Have the number of pages on the site remained the same and pages are being removed from the index? Or have you added more content, but the percentage in the index has decreased?
• Have you checked your robots.txt file or page-level meta robots tag to see if you are blocking or noindexing anything?
• Have you submitted an XML sitemap?  If so, check the XML sitemap to make sure what's being submitted should be indexed. It's possible to submit a sitemap that includes noindexed pages, especially with some automated tools.
• Is it a large site? If so, check for issues that may affect crawl budget.
• Have you changed any canonical tags?
• Have you used the Fetch as Google tool to diagnose a specific URL?

As with many SEO questions, the answer here is "It depends." What type of content is duplicated on the city pages? How much unique content is there in addition to the duplicated content?

Having the same content on unique city pages is not necessarily a problem. Google will serve up the page that is most relevant to the search query and will filter out the rest. However, if all of the content is the same across all of these pages, the overall site would be considered lower quality.  The key is to balance any duplicated content with additional unique content that provides value for the site visitor.

We usually noindex the archives subpages and sometimes the main blog page itself (if it isn't the home page). I'd prefer to see the individual blog post pages in search results than page 2 of blog index page. Depending on how your blog is set up, you run the risk of an internal duplicate content issue. The only way to guarantee that the search engines prioritize the single post page is to noindex the blog index pages.

John Mueller addressed a similar question in a recent Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, and he was pretty definitive. The question was about text that's hidden behind tabs. He states that they see the hidden content but won't give it as much weight.

Here's the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZAY-BwL6rU.  The question starts at 6:45.

Google does read JavaScript and CSS, and that's why they send warnings to webmasters if such files are blocked from googlebot.

You can find the 35 temporary redirects that Moz reports using the Screaming Frog tool. You'll see the redirects for individual links under the "Response Codes" tab. Look for the "Redirect URI" column.

The fastest way to find all of the redirects is to go to "Reports" > "Redirect Chains." This will show all the redirects on the site. I think you have to purchase a license for this feature.

If you are trying to find redirects that have been set up for incoming links from external sites, you'll have to access the .htaccess file. I also do a site:domain.com search in Google just to see if there are old links still in the index. Then keep an eye on 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools after the site launches.

Google has indicated that they don't use Schema data for ranking purposes.  Adding the schema will not make it less likely for you to rank for "Autism Alternative Treatment Arizona" than you are now.

Do you provide any services to clients in California, or is your website more of a resource site with information about autism? If it's the latter, you really don't need to worry about queries with a local intent. Focus instead on making your site a topical authority with high-quality content.

Search volume is only one factor that you should consider when analyzing keywords. At a minimum, we look at the following during keyword research.

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty (Using Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool)
• Relevance (How relevant is the query to the client's business, website, products, or services? This is a subjective number that we score as a percentage.)
• Searcher intent - There are lots of different ways to classify user intent. See this, this, and this for more info.
• Google's perception of user intent - Analyze the SERPs to see what types of results appear for that query.

The last two are key for your issue. Take a look at the SERPs. Every result for "odor eliminator" is for a product rather than a service, and the top ranking sites are powerful brand sites like amazon.com, walmart.com, and homedepot.com. On the other hand, if someone searches "odor removal service," they are clearly not looking for a product. If my assumptions are correct, that query is 100% relevant to what your client is offering.

My advice is to focus on the more relevant, less competitive keyword in this particular case. .

In the WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Reading.

Find "Search Engine Visibility." Is "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" checked? If so, uncheck it.

Your friend has to give Google a reason to send searchers to his website instead of the many well-known authority sites that have the same verses.  Is he providing a lot of unique commentary, or are the pages mostly bible verses that can be found on thousands of other sites? If it's the former, then he should be okay. If it's the latter, he may want to focus on adding more unique content.

It's perfectly normal to link two sites together like this. It can be useful to site visitors, and it's also very common. The problem comes when you have dozens of websites cross-linking together in some sort of link network.

More information

• Google's Matt Cutts Says It Is Okay To Link Your Sites Together But in Moderation

It's really going to depend on the search query. Some search queries are seen as having local intent regardless of whether or not a geo-modifier (i.e. "Chicago") is included in the search. Since your client's site is for the national organization, or the main website for the brand, you'll likely outperform for some queries based on brand strength, backlinks, domain authority, etc., than the localized websites.  On the other hand, if someone searches for "summer day camp," that searcher is likely looking for a local service provider.

Are you specifically searching for the query "dog safety" in Chicago for the example you provided? That seems like more of an informational query, so your site would need to be seen as a topical authority to perform well.

You say that your .net site uses a search function (zip code search?) to display the individual locations. Is the location info crawlable by the search engines, or is it hidden behind the search functionality?  If you want the .net site to perform for local searches, you'll need to work on optimizing local landing pages that can be easily found and indexed by search engines.

The purpose of Open Site Explorer is to show backlinks. It is not intended to show how those links are redirected on your site. If your 301 redirects are set up properly, anyone who clicks on them will be redirected to the proper page on your site. However, you would have to ask the websites linking to you to change the URLs if you want those URLs to be updated (and reflected in OSE).

Toxic, spammy links can only hurt you, but they are even more harmful if they make up a large percentage of your total backlinks. Remove/disavow them as soon as possible and work on earning legitimate, high-value backlinks. Also, over-optimized link text can be harmful as well.

The problem is that these two pages have almost identical content on them, and the content on these product pages is thin anyway. This is a common problem with ecommerce websites, and some ecommerce platforms automatically create a lot of duplication headaches  You also seem to have a related issue with crawl inefficiencies.

Yes, this may very well be affecting your performance in SERPs.

There are a number of ways to address duplicate content issues on ecommerce websites. The precise strategy to use will depend on the specific issue, and you have multiple issues that need to be addressed on your site that relate to duplicate content. Below are some resources that you might find helpful.

• https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2300528/ecommerce-product-pages-how-to-fix-duplicate-thin-too-much-content#
• http://www.goinflow.com/duplicate-content-ecommerce-seo/
• http://www.goinflow.com/are-duplicate-url-paths-killing-your-ecommerce-seo/

You were right to redirect 1 directly to 3. It's not a huge problem to have short redirect chains, but the best practice is to redirect to the current live site.

No, it isn't necessary to noindex the pages if you add canonical tags or when you redirect them. Once you point the old domain to the main domain and set up any manual redirects, the old pages are irrelevant. You can go ahead and remove the website files from the server and close the hosting account (if applicable). Just make sure you keep the domain renewed and pointed to the new site.

Eventually, Google will update their index based on your 301-redirects.

In my opinion, the best time to start investing in SEO is when a website is in the planning stages and throughout the development process.  Technical and structural issues can have a tremendous effect on how a site performs in search.

While you are actively developing content, it's a good idea to engage an SEO provider to work with you in the process.

By default, I think Yoast uses the post title as the Page Title with the sitename appended to the end. If you just want it to be the page title, you'll need to update the Yoast settings.

In the WP dashboard, go to SEO (Yoast settings) > Titles & Metas > Post Types tab.  Add %%title%% next to the Title template. Your page level settings will override these on any pages where you have added a custom page title.

Add the following noindex meta tag to let Google know that you don't want these pages indexed. See more info here. 

Mike Blumenthal posted a breakdown of a Mediative study in September that you might find useful.

LOCAL HEAT MAPS – LOTS OF ATTENTION, NOT SO MUCH CLICKING

This duplicate content does need to be addressed, but it's not as complicated as you might think.

Use pagination to solve the "page=1" issues, or use a canonical with a "View all" option. See the following for reference:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Set up the canonical links for the others, and that's all you'll need. You may want to noindex all of the tag pages for the blog unless you have unique content on those.

You can list all 5 addresses on your contact page, but you should consider creating local landing pages if you serve customers at each location. See the following for some best practices.

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/30/16-ways-to-create-unique-local-content-for-cities-where-you-want-to-rank/

As for your second question, if you want to drive traffic through local search, you definitely want to clean up local business citations.