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Just started working on a website with 2 services and a LOT of locations... So website is something like categorized in states and subcategories are cities... But it only offers 2 services. So each city out of 100 has one page per service...

It seems to me like something not pretty good but I have no experience with such sites. I know that it is ok if you have stores on different locations so you can do local for all them but in this case website owner just wanted to rank high for 100 cities and actually he is doing pretty good...

But I somehow think that may cause problems in future and google could consider it as a spam, no matter of unique content on 100 pages when it is actually the same...

So if you have any advice for this situation, I am listening

I could agree that it happens that sometimes google penalizes innocent sites but we can count it as collateral damage. Google is not perfect. But in most cases when innocent people get penalized they are not so innocent.

You mentioned "keyword rich anchor text" as an example. If google didn't penalize for that and people start making 100% of the links with same keyword rich anchor text then it is not innocent. If my brand is "m2webs" and my site is about "how to bake potatoes" does it look like innocent if all my anchors are "how to make bake potatoes" ? It is just not logical that out of 300 links I have all the 300 are with that anchor text. People will in many cases link just brand name or url as it is more natural, like brand.com, or www.brand.com or even "click here"...

So yes, some techniques work right now and are not penalized but could be sooner or later. And I must say that in most cases by using simple logic and common sense you can realize by yourself if something could be penalized and avoid that.

If you see advertising "50.000 visits in 30 days just for $5" does it look logical. Does anyone think that for $5 you can get 50.000 real visitors and potential customers ? You don't need to be internet marketing expert to realize that.

It is not a guesswork for sure. Actually it is very simple. By changing possible ranking factors on your website and analyzing how it influences SERP changes you can come to conclusion which of that factors are more or less important. So by time you get more and more info how that Google works.

Next step is to get more quality info and that info includes more extensive research on a big number of sites and sharing experience with other people, using tools which automatically do some analysis for you and so on...

As an electrician you know facts and deal according to them. The problem with google is that factors are changing. People are always trying to find a way to rank better with no efforts and google is fighting against that.

Once upon a time there were meta keywords and google used them to find out what about is that page. People realized that and spammed it to death. So google removed it as a ranking factor. Then people started stealing content from other sites to make huge website without efforts. Then google said "we will penalize that"... And so on...

Many people know how google works but noone knows it 100%. Just when you think you know almost everything it is already changed. So, one part of that is thinking in advance also. So when you get "opposite" answers to your question one of the reason may be that you get "old data" or just wrong answers.

So if you would ask me what the most important factors are I would say:

1. Quality content (unique, complete, media rich)
2. Users experience and engagement (on website and social media)
3. Authority gained by backlinks (perfectly if gained by points 1 and 2)

So if you are electrician and your website has just phone number and address on it for sure you will be ranked low. If you add more info about yourself you will rank better. Add some images of your work and someone may share it. Add some how to, or diy articles and you will get some audience. And all of that may produce some natural backlinks. Be active on social media...

After all it comes to some mathematical things so you can use moz crawl test and page grader to see what is wrong or what you miss, fix it and that's it - simple

That about liability is what I should think of. About on-page, I actually didn't use it anywhere except in title of tags on some pages with short title tag and it is still ranking good for those keywords even without any single mention of "top" or "best"

Anyway, thanks for response. Will try to get some links from bloggers' top lists

Thanks for your answer. Although your answer is perfectly right and that will give a lot more value I would like to know a bit more about onpage aspects. So how smarter google is now when that is in case. I suppose as semantic search will be deeper by time it will be a bit more easier to rank for it.

I would like to know if someone has proven info how google today counts words "Top" or "Best" when in front of main keywords you try to rank for.

For example, if I have a keyword like "Restaurants in Madrid" and I optimize that page without using words "top" or "best" will it have good rankings for keywords "top restaurants in madrid" and "best restaurants in madrid" ?

I suppose that google is smart enough to know that web page should be good ranked even without using those 2 words but would like to know percentage of my loss if I just exclude those words from title tag and other important onpage factors. I want to rank high for all the 3 combinations, with "top", with "best" and without it in front so searching for best solution.

I plan just to add one of those words, for example "top" and hope that google will know that "top" = "best"

I track a lot of websites, not carefully but from time to time check positions. Some of them are active clients, some of them I worked for before and I must say that this update seems as "ok done" with not many mistakes.

In general, around 50% of sites are on the same positions. Around 40% had slight improvements and 10% lost positions.

What I realized, and would like to know if you have same experiences is that this update was something like on "keyword based" level. On 5-6 websites which lost positions it looks strange because some #1 positions stayed at #1 and some dropped like from #1-#5 to #120-#200.

One website lost 60% of visits and it was my test website. I have 31 pages on that website and all of them looks like "word1 word2 different word" so it if for sure spam looking website. All the 30-40 keywords were in top20 and arond 10 #1. So it is "strange" that a lot of high ranked keywords went to #120+ positions but something like 5-6 keywords still #1.

Another thing, if I am not wrong, is that google focused also on the websites owned by same person who owns same niche websites. I have something like a partner with around 10 dental sites. 6-7 of them stayed pretty the same and 3-4 had slight drops, one had major drops. what is important is that all the content is unique, not spammy on all of them and links were pretty the same. I mean, he made links sometimes using the same source (rubbish) but a big number of links not in any connection so like 70% of links per site were "unique" sources. But again, in his case drops were like "per keyword", some keywords still on #1 and same website lost other keywords from top10 to #120+

Did you have same experiences maybe ?

FB, Twitter, LinkedIn

In pure math SEO terms it is "The more - the better"

But it is about quality - not length. If you give your readers real value you will gain links to that post, no matter if it is 250 or 1250 words. If you write something epic who cares if it is shorter or longer and if it is epic it will not be boring

check example (saw that on seomoz newsletter):

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

is it boring ? For sure not! Very long but in this case it is short if you count that almost all the link building methods carefully described in short terms!

It is not a guesswork for sure. Actually it is very simple. By changing possible ranking factors on your website and analyzing how it influences SERP changes you can come to conclusion which of that factors are more or less important. So by time you get more and more info how that Google works.

Next step is to get more quality info and that info includes more extensive research on a big number of sites and sharing experience with other people, using tools which automatically do some analysis for you and so on...

As an electrician you know facts and deal according to them. The problem with google is that factors are changing. People are always trying to find a way to rank better with no efforts and google is fighting against that.

Once upon a time there were meta keywords and google used them to find out what about is that page. People realized that and spammed it to death. So google removed it as a ranking factor. Then people started stealing content from other sites to make huge website without efforts. Then google said "we will penalize that"... And so on...

Many people know how google works but noone knows it 100%. Just when you think you know almost everything it is already changed. So, one part of that is thinking in advance also. So when you get "opposite" answers to your question one of the reason may be that you get "old data" or just wrong answers.

So if you would ask me what the most important factors are I would say:

1. Quality content (unique, complete, media rich)
2. Users experience and engagement (on website and social media)
3. Authority gained by backlinks (perfectly if gained by points 1 and 2)

So if you are electrician and your website has just phone number and address on it for sure you will be ranked low. If you add more info about yourself you will rank better. Add some images of your work and someone may share it. Add some how to, or diy articles and you will get some audience. And all of that may produce some natural backlinks. Be active on social media...

After all it comes to some mathematical things so you can use moz crawl test and page grader to see what is wrong or what you miss, fix it and that's it - simple