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If I might revive this discussion, I actually have a similar situation for a lawyer based in California. He has recently obtained some very positive reviews on Yelp, earning him a 5 star rating. However, he has heard word through the grapevine that Yelp will lower the exposure of his positive reviews if he doesn't start advertising on Yelp as well. Personally, my gut is telling me this is not true (and would be quite unethical of Yelp!), but I have yet to find concrete evidence of it. Would anyone have any thoughts and/or research on this?

Thanks!

Hello All,

We have been having an issue with very high crawl errors on websites that contain blogs. Here is a screenshot of one of the sites we are dealing with: http://cl.ly/image/0i2Q2O100p2v .

Looking through the links that are turning up in the crawl errors, the majority of them (roughly 90%) are auto-generated by the blog's system. This includes category/tag links, archived links, etc. A few examples being:

http://www.mysite.com/2004/10/

http://www.mysite.com/2004/10/17/

http://www.mysite.com/tagname

As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong!), search engines will not penalize you for things like this that appear on auto-generated pages. Also, even if search engines did penalize you, I do not believe we can make a unique meta tag for auto-generate pages. Regardless, our client is very concerned seeing these high number of errors in the reports, even though we have explained the situation to him.

Would anyone have any suggestions on how to either 1) tell Moz to ignore these types of errors or 2) adjust the website so that these errors now longer appear in the reports?

Thanks so much!

• Rebecca

I'll give it a shot, thank you again for your help!

Thanks, Justin! At the very least, it sounds like I may be able to create a label for this list of keywords, filter my keyword results, and then export a PDF of those specific rankings. Would that work?

Hello all,

My client recently asked me if there was a way to highlight a specific list of keywords to put on the first page of every report. These would be the highest priority keywords that we would always want to know the status of for his site.

In the reports section, I am only seeing options for organizing the keywords by rankings improved/declined and comparing to competitors. Would anyone know how to label/categorize this list of keywords and then produce them as part of the monthly reports?

Thank you,
Daniel

Hey Mike,

That sounds like an interesting discussion and sorry I couldn't hear it in person. I'm not sure if this would be relevant to my specific project though - our ultimate goal is to merge two existing sites into one. They have relatively the same content and subjects, meaning the userbase is also probably very similar. The speech that you're referring to sounds like it would be more suitable for a site that is going through a redesign and moving to a new domain name. Your thoughts?

I was leaning towards doing all the redirects at once, but didn't have the experience to back that theory up. Thanks for the advice!

Hi EGOL,

The sites that we are merging were penalized about 2 years ago. Their value has since begun to increase again, but they still haven't reached the level they were at before the penalization. After all the research we did to answer "why" they were penalized, we could only assume that it was because of our client's massive network of sites.

This was all implemented before I came onto the project. A mistake was made somewhere along the way that set off a "red flag" to Google that these sites were in cahoots (for lack of a better phrase) and penalized them.

We're hoping that the penalization occurred long enough ago that it will not harm the sites we are consolidating the penalized sites into.

My understanding of subdomains vs. folders is that for instances where the topics could virtually be separated (as is the case with multiple geographical locations), then subdomains are the optimal way to go. My client is also interested in ranking well in Google Local, and wants to have separate listings for each business location - which will also be beneficial if we take the subdomain route. I'll admit though, I'm a bit rusty on this topic and would welcome any advice or further resources! I'll do some more research, but if you have any further thoughts on the matter please do send them my way!

Thanks again!

Thanks, TommyTan, that's very reassuring!

Hi TommyTan,

Thanks for this info and the article, it's a great resource! We plan on mapping out both sites entirely and matching the topics A to A and B to B as you mentioned and this reminded me of a question I should have included in my last post:

Are there any potential risks to doing these redirects all at once? We have at least 3 domains that we want to redirect to the corresponding subdomains, and we don't want to make such a major change to the site that we risk major SERP drops. I'm wondering if we should redirect one domain at a time over a few months, or just do it all in one major sweep...

We're expecting the delay in seeing the affects, and while I know it's unavoidable, convincing my client of this is the big challenge! Like I said, he's very sensitive to his site's SEO data, and any drop in stats after we make a major change instantly makes him second guess the move.

Thanks again!

Hey Everyone,

I've tried searching for this question, but am not exactly sure what keywords to search for so I'm probably missing the resources if they already exist...

My client has had duplicated sites for years, and after multiple penalizations of those sites I was finally able to convince him to consolidate them into a "mega-site". Currently, he has a main domain, a geo-subdomain for each office location under the main domain, and a geo-domain for each office location.

We plan on redirecting each geo-domain to the corresponding geo-subdomain.  So, the final result will be one main domain, and a sub-domain for each office location.

I'm looking for any information regarding tracking SEO data after the redirects are in place, how to guard against potential drops in SERPs, what's the smartest strategy to implement, etc... My client is very sensitive to his sites' SEO data, so if anyone has any SEO-related advice regarding redirecting sites it would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

Thank you for these resources, they've helped a lot in trying to figure out the Google+ vs Local issue. Unfortunately, it looks like my client is best suited to wait it out - He tends to be an action-first type of person, so it looks like I have some convincing ahead of me

I think one of the comments on the blog post was dead on when they said "You know someone said the abilty to make complicated things simple is genius. Well.. Google is no genius!" Hopefully this is just a temporary confusion that will work itself out for business owners as Google continues to perfect the merge...

Hey Everyone,

I've been out of the game for a few months, and I am amazed at how much I've missed! I'm trying to wrap my head around the difference between Google+, Google+ Local, and Google Places - can anyone help?

My client has a Google+ account and manages multiple businesses under Google Places. I can't seem to get google to connect the two though (the account login is the same). I know Google is still working on migrating Google Places to Google+ Local, so here's my question:

How do I obtain ownership of my Google Places listings in Google+ Local? I already have ownership of the Google Places listings, but when I log into the Google+ account there is no proof of ownership. I can add the related Google+ Local locations to my "Pages" in Google+, but it lists me as a manager and not an owner.

My client has been penalized by Google in the past (not my doing, but unfortunately something I now have to deal with), so I want to tread lightly as I optimize his local listings. Any assistance to help me figure this out is greatly appreciated! Also, if anyone knows of a good book on Google+ Local for business owners I would love the referral!

Thanks!