Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Nichole,

What type of links are we talking about? What type of sites are they on?

It usually takes 1-2 months for new links to show in my Moz reports. I have seen some take up to 3-6 months.

In my opinion it depends on how often the linking site is indexed.  My links from news and info sites show up quickly, while links from more static sites take longer.

I understand.  It comes down to the type of Facebook page you decide to use for your business - this is going to be a double edged sword for how you want the title to look and your local SEO objectives.

If you choose to build a "brand" page in facebook then the tittle tag will automatically appear as you want it ( **Brand Name | Facebook ). **But these brand pages do not carry any local SEO value because it is not tied to a physical location. This is often used by large national companies that don't have physical locations.  Also alot of small local businesses have this style of page because they set it up wrong to start with, I've had many clients like this.

If you select a local business page, then it appears as I mention above (Brand Name - Location - Category | Facebook). The presence of your NAP (name, address, & phone #) aligns with your local SEO effort.

So if your goal is Local Search Optimization, you need to stick with the local business page style on Facebook. Switching to a brand page would hurt your rankings.  Optimizing  for Local Search is not going to always be pretty.

Hope that helps! Good Luck.

Hey Chris,

I understand that Google+ will stay in some form because that is the primary way Google collects and verify listings.  With out Google+ where would the local result info come from.

What I'm interested in is why the pages themselves, with the about, shared info, and photos are now more difficult to find.

Thanks for your input.

Little bit of a strange question.  Are you trying to optimize the page for Local Search or just general SEO?

As far as the page title for your Facebook page, you have very little control. Facebook is in control of the page title since it's under their domain.  The typical format for Facebook Business Page titles is :

Brand Name - Location - Category | Facebook

As for Local Search, the page title on your Facebook page does not really play a part.  Having your Facebook NAP and other info match that of your Google+ and other listings is the primary factor.

For General SEO, having a facebook page that points back to your brand and regular sharing of blog post can help optimize YOUR website.

Hope that helps.

While looking over a client’s monthly analytics, I noticed some oddities in the Links- competitive metrics.  Although my clients leads in every category, they were still trailing in “total Links” to a competitor.  That competitor has 25K links to our 1.9K.

So I ran OpenSiteExplorer on the competitor and found that they had 25, 636 internal links.  This is a very basic website, with only about 50 pages.  It appears the links started building in January and just keep increasing.

Anyone seen this before?  Any ideas why they would do this?

So now we have the new 3-pack local results, which obviously cut the listings Google+ link from the results.

What I find strange is that is now even when searching the business name alone, there is no sign of the associated Google+ page in the results.  I still get other local third party listings like Facebook, Yellowpages, and Yelp – but no link anywhere for the Google+ page.

I noticed this today when I wanted to verify something on a client’s page. There was nothing I could do search wise to bring up this business Google+ page.  I finally got it by clicking the link through Moz local.

After exploring this with some other clients, when I do get a Google+ page in the search results some have produced a 500 error when clicked on.

If Google wasn’t killing off Google+, why would they completely omit the pages from their own search results?

Another extremely strange thing, the majority of my clients are independent local businesses inside a large national company.  Their Google+ listings have always been managed corporately using a bulk listing feed. We could never gain access to these pages and would always manage our listings to match that of the corp. controlled page.  Well the last week of July they announced they were giving us the option to take control of the page.  This happened with two different companies, MAJOR national competitors in the same industry, within a couple days of each other. They now treat it just like another version of social media, instead of a major factor within search.  I find it hard to believe that something isn’t going on…

I've been using Moz Local on all my clients. One client in particular, I've been using Moz Local on for 6 months.  Their Moz Local stats all look good inside the dash board.

While killing some time the weekend, I ran a few reports on them in Bright Local.  None of the sites Moz Local is supposed to be pushing too has the correct listings. They are all different just like before I started. Why is this?

After looking running the open site explorer, it looks like all my links go directly to the home page.  I'm not seeing anything going to any other pages.  So I should be ok if I'm not switching my domain name?

Thanks Don,

That's exactly the situation we are in.  I appreciate the help.

About to completely redo a client's site and I want to make sure I don't loose our link juice.

The current site is a old template site from another provider.  They host it and we do not have access at all to the site itself, so there will be no transferring of the site from server to server because they feel the site is their property. Basically the site is a monthly service not a product.

So this will be a completely new website, including new URL structure. So my question is how do keep the link juice flowing to the new site?

I know I need to use 301 redirects, but do I rebuild those old URLs on my site and redirect them to their new counterpart or what?

The link profile is not that impressive, maybe 15 back links (all mainly going to the homepage).  But they all are local and coming from pretty good domain authority. But its keeping us ahead of our competition.

Back story: This is one of my local search clients, we now have them ranking #1 across the board in the local packs. After analyzing the traffic, they are losing 75% of all traffic because of the sites design. So a new site is a must.  I build a lot of websites, but have never worried about the back link profile before now.

Thanks for all your help!

Thanks David,

I most of my clients are professionals, so I get several listings for the practice name and then several listings for each doctor plus the practice name. I think the information is being scrapped from some professional association groups.  New ones keep popping up each month, mainly coming from Yahoo and its affiliates.

Hey,

In my experience and opinion, it doesn't reflect a linking scheme. This is a pretty common practice in both the online and offline marketing world, the disclosure is used to separate an actual review from a paid promotion.

I have never have had negative SEO results from using a disclaimer.

Just my 2 cents. Hope that helps.

Hey guys,

Is there ever any circumstance you don't want to request removal of duplicate listings in MOZ Local?

Thanks in advance

Hey,

I've ran across this situation many times.  Although the traffic volume is much lower for the location targeted keyword, that traffic will tend to be much more qualified.  Pumping traffic into the site will not do much good if it's not qualified traffic.

Also, while you probably can't beat State Farm in the national organic rankings, you can easily beat out the local agent in the local pack.

So it comes down to what your goal is - More traffic or improved rankings?( SEO or local SEO)  I tend to work for improved rankings.

Hope that helps

I have mixed feelings about them.  While it looks good to be certified by Google, the test are really not that hard and more about their Adwords program ins and outs.   Helps if you go in with a complete knowledge of PPC strategy first.

Just my thoughts.

Richard

Hey,

I come from a newspaper background and still design and run several major newspaper websites, and Google does treat these as duplicate content.  That's why AP news stories don't generate much if any organic web traffic. Same applies with the press releases.

Most publications will rewrite bulk content to make it unique, therefor everything is original.  Many papers I work with will publish an AP story as it breaks and update the story with a unique version as soon as possible.

Side note is that Google tends to crawl and update news sites more often than other sites, so it does not take long for the content to be indexed.

Hope that helps

Hey

As a general rule, you should have an optimized page for each keyword your trying to rank for. Its difficult to rank with a page for several different keywords. Just remember you're NOT trying to rank your homepage, your trying to rank the unique landing page for that keyword.

Hope that helps, best of luck

I'm not sure I completely understand your question, but if your trying to identify the source of your inbound links use the Open Site Explorer tool. It will give the source of the incoming link, the page it's linking to, plus the domain and page authority of the linking site.

Removing links is a bit more complicated.  You can use the disavow tool located in Google Webmaster Tools to unclaim these links.  Unless you've been hit with a penalty or have engaged in some questionable back link building schemes, I would not mess with disavowing any links.

Hope that helps, best of luck

Personally I think it depends on the type of site I'm working with.  An eCommerce retail site and a corporate business page are very different in my book. I also like a simple, easy to read format (for both robots and users).

posts title template (%%title%% %%sep%% %%category%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%)

page title template (%%title%%  %%sep%% %%sitename%%)

If your page is optimized for the selected keyword(s), then they will be appearing with the title. I've had good look with it recently.

Thanks Ray.

I was also under the impression that Yext may have created this listing trying to get a foot in the door. I also share the same dislike for Yext as you do.

We already have a page out ranking the false listing, but that false listing just started popping up in the first page of results. Another issue is the the way the listing is title makes it seem the office manager is a dentist.

Guess I will give contacting them a shot. Thanks again.

I've recently discovered a fake yahoo local listing for one of my clients.  The listing uses the office managers name along with the business, and all the correct contact information. The listing is not verified. I've tried to claim it but it just forwards me to the yext service.  Under yahoo help, it tells that if the listing is not verified I will need to contact the database provider to have the info removed (Localeze, InfoUSA, Yext, YP) Problem is there is no listing in any of these data bases.  Any ideas?