Google does look at h tags to understand the structure of the content on the page better, Googler John Mueller confirmed this several years ago. Therefore it’s good practice to have your H1 as a main page or title of the piece then main subheadings as H2, any further sub-headings needed to divide content under these H3-H6. A lot don’t go to this depth and focus on H1 and multiple H2s achieving good results. When I have taken it further I don’t believe it has made a significant impact on rankings compared to when I haven’t. 
Hope this helps

I tend to use the Panguin Tool and look for sudden drops in traffic at update times - http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ - it maps your sites google analytics against updates.

Hope this helps

As Donald says you can rewrite content for each location and give it a location specific flavor.

One thing I would also recommend when working on something like this is spend the time trying to get some user generated content such a reviews and testimonials. This will give it a more unique local feel.

If each location has similar products but not exactly the same could you slightly vary product focus and weight of content accordingly.

I don't know you setup or budget but you could even look to get different writers for different locations. You may even look to get different business owners/franchise managers to have input on the content for their site. In some situations you may even have some keen to write some content that you can proof/edit.

Hope this helps

I would definitely say that your site is over-optimised and that you are having issues as you have built a lot of landing pages for locations which are very similar just with postcodes and location names being the main difference.I know you have tried to write unique content and specific location information but it still feels very similar and over-optimised purely written as an aggressive way to rank in all these London locations. I would say your site could be classed as being full of doorway pages for all the locations and this is definitely something Google doesn't like and falls fowl of their guidelines thus hurting your ranking ability. You also don't appear to have physical locations in these places so they are more of a service area. As you aren't ranking at the moment I would personally cut everything back focus on ranking for your actual physical location then you may want to choose service areas and build some pages around these, but you don't want to overdo this and you definitely don't want a cookie cutter approach. Look to build pages that really are unique. You also need to look at building the main service areas you cover into your main navigation not at the bottom of your page.

Here is an article on Search Engine Land which addresses this very well and gives you lots of points to consider in order to help you get your site sorted and hopefully ranking - http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Have you also looked at how others have ranked for the main terms you mention above? Competition that is successful is always a good place to look

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi

Are you using an international domain such as .com or are you using a country specific domain as this is one obvious way Google can determine your location other than in Search Console. If you are using an international domain Google looks at several factors to determine your location including IP Address, any address listings on your site, Google My Business and even links to your site.

Have a look here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Mike

On the watermark question I would personally remove the watermark as I believe you will find that whether watermarks impact your ranking or not putting people of clicking and interacting with your images is a negative.

I would also do it from a quality point of view and I would draw your attention to Google's Guidelines on Image Publishing

"Similarly, some people add copyright text, watermarks, or other information to their images. This kind of information won't impact your image's performance in search results, and does help photographers claim credit for their work and deter unknown usage. However, if a feature such as watermarking reduces the user-perceived quality of your image or your image's thumbnail, users may click it less often in search results."

I imagine you have already had a look at this and I would recommend you go with your findings on this.

Here are Google's guidelines to Image Publishing - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016

I would also remove the watermark from you images in terms of wanting people to use images and then doing a reverse image search to find sites that use them. I would then request attribution if you haven't already been given it - great way to get exposure.

I would also try to simplify your folder structure as 9 levels deep is very deep and likely to make Googles crawl of your images less efficient. I don't understand the reasoning of an individual image per folder - something more like images segmented by subject or even month like default WordPress would make more sense.

Do you have an image sitemap in place? If not here is some more info from Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en

Hope this helps

Matt

I agree with Moosa and Danny - in terms of I use Screaming Frog (full paid version) on a stripped down windows machine with an SSD and 16GB of performance RAM. I have also download the 64 bit version of Java and increased the memory allocation for Screaming Frog to 12GB (default limit is 512mb) - here's how - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/general/ (look at the section Increasing Memory on Windows 32 & 64-bit)

I did this as I was having issues crawling a large site - after I put this system in place it eats any site I have thrown at it so far so it works well for me personally. In terms of speed of crawl large sites such as you mention will still take a while - you can set crawl speed in Screaming Frog, but you need to be careful as you can overload the server of the site you are crawling and cause issues...

Another option would be to buy a server and configure it for Screaming Frog and other tools you may use - this gives you options to grow the system as your needs grow. It all depends on budget and how often you crawl large sites - obviously buying a server such as a windows instance on Amazon EC2 will cost more in the long run but it takes the strain away from your own systems and networks plus you should effectively never hit capacity on the server as you can just upgrade. It will also allow you to remote desktop in on whatever system you use - yes even a Mac

Hope this helps

I agree with Dirk - the names you have suggested would work fine and there is a clear difference between each. Obviously the more descriptive you can be with each file the better - but often easier said than done on eCommerce sites.

The biggest issue here is that the developer did a blanket redirect to the homepage of the new domain - never a good plan. You are using a 301 redirect to tell search engines that a page and its content has moved to a location - however the content should still be the same or similar. That way the URL that is being redirected to is still relevant when people visit via the old URL. Obviously when you do go down the route of doing 301 redirects even done properly can cause some fluctuation in rankings, but it is best practice to minimise impact of such a move and transfer old authority gained through links.

As you say why did the developer or site owner decide they needed to move domains? If they were doing well to start as you say this really doesn't make sense. You can reverse a 301 redirect  - this old Q&A you might find interesting.

http://moz.com/community/q/undo-a-301-redirect

If you are going to reverse things I would do page level redirects from this new domain back to the old.

Go back to the old structure and URLs if possible - do you have an old sitemap or crawl of these? If not you will find the way back when machine handy for seeing old site structure I find - http://archive.org/web/

I would then submit a new up-to-date sitemap of your old domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

On a side note - has the on-page such as page titles and other ranking factors been changed since the move to the new site? If so I would look to change these back to when you had stronger rankings.

Not a simple case as you say but I hope this helps

No problem - that's what this great community is all about

William is right meta keywords is essentially a worthless tag that is no longer used by most search engines, as it was a method abused by spammers in the past (in the days of the meta crawler when you could type any term in and still be served porn). Bing still takes them into account as a signal for spammers not ranking!

http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874

I always look at competitors meta-data in order to give me a quick overview of their targetted terms, so I would think about ditching them if I were you, though don't panic if you don't., just don't give precious time to them..

The biggest issue here is that the developer did a blanket redirect to the homepage of the new domain - never a good plan. You are using a 301 redirect to tell search engines that a page and its content has moved to a location - however the content should still be the same or similar. That way the URL that is being redirected to is still relevant when people visit via the old URL. Obviously when you do go down the route of doing 301 redirects even done properly can cause some fluctuation in rankings, but it is best practice to minimise impact of such a move and transfer old authority gained through links.

As you say why did the developer or site owner decide they needed to move domains? If they were doing well to start as you say this really doesn't make sense. You can reverse a 301 redirect  - this old Q&A you might find interesting.

http://moz.com/community/q/undo-a-301-redirect

If you are going to reverse things I would do page level redirects from this new domain back to the old.

Go back to the old structure and URLs if possible - do you have an old sitemap or crawl of these? If not you will find the way back when machine handy for seeing old site structure I find - http://archive.org/web/

I would then submit a new up-to-date sitemap of your old domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

On a side note - has the on-page such as page titles and other ranking factors been changed since the move to the new site? If so I would look to change these back to when you had stronger rankings.

Not a simple case as you say but I hope this helps

Hi Savio,

I think that you will find this whiteboard Friday very interesting in relation to comment marketing - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/comment-marketing-as-an-inbound-tactic-whiteboard-friday

In terms of links carrying any weight, I think it is important to think about quality and building trust in a community before posting links. I would also be very careful with anchor text. What you have to remember is that since Google's Penguin update link profiles have been under more scrutiny than ever so having some blog comments from appropriate blogs in your niche will carry weight. If a link is no followed then it won't pass link juice and so help add to your authority but what you have to look at is what other value it passes in terms of referral traffic, recognition etc.

People have tended to stay away from using blog comments as a form of link building because this leads to spammy practises of just posting for links sake. If you have a lot of anchor text from random blogs then it will stick out like a saw thumb when Google looks at your link profile and you are likely to get hit. However if you use comments properly and it is appropriate to link to your site occasionally then you are more likely to add value to your site in the eyes of the search engines...

As you say you are leaving good comments and adding value so this is a natural practice, but purely looking at it as a good form of link building then I think you need to rethink things. As Rand says; using comments correctly will help you build authority and gain recognition in these communities which will help with exposure to your site and work. From this you will pick up links naturally.

_"_You are not, not trying to build links. No, not directly anyway. Eventually, over time, one of the goals is hopefully to get some links, maybe to get a blogger to mention you, point over to your stuff, not to build profiles, which, essentially, is just a form of link spam or of reputation management where you're building all these profiles across different sites, and not to comment without adding value." A quote from Rand's WBF from the link above.

404's can loose link juice and cause the most issues when a page that had lots of link pointing to it passing authority becomes a 404 page. As this page no longer exists the authority that was being passed to it from the links that were pointing at it will be lost when Google eventually de-indexes the page. You also must remember that this page is likely to be in Google Index and if people click on it and it is not found they are more likely to bounce from your site. You will also loose what terms this page was ranking for when it is eventually de-indexed as well. Redirecting this page to its new location or a similar/relevant page will help keep most of this authority that has been earnt helping with your ranking and keeping human visitors happy.

You also need to think of this from a crawl point of view - lots of 404s doesn't make your site very friendly as Googlebot is wasting time trying to crawl pages that don't exist. Ultimately making sure you don't have 404 pages and keep on top of redirecting these is important particularly if the page had authority. A great big hint to the importance is the fact that Google reports these crawl issues in Google Webmaster Tools in order for you to be able to monitor and fix them.

On a side note I have seen cases where sites have had a lot of 404s due to a significant change of URL structure and they haven't done any redirects - they have lost the majority of their organic rankings and traffic!

Hi Mike

On the watermark question I would personally remove the watermark as I believe you will find that whether watermarks impact your ranking or not putting people of clicking and interacting with your images is a negative.

I would also do it from a quality point of view and I would draw your attention to Google's Guidelines on Image Publishing

"Similarly, some people add copyright text, watermarks, or other information to their images. This kind of information won't impact your image's performance in search results, and does help photographers claim credit for their work and deter unknown usage. However, if a feature such as watermarking reduces the user-perceived quality of your image or your image's thumbnail, users may click it less often in search results."

I imagine you have already had a look at this and I would recommend you go with your findings on this.

Here are Google's guidelines to Image Publishing - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016

I would also remove the watermark from you images in terms of wanting people to use images and then doing a reverse image search to find sites that use them. I would then request attribution if you haven't already been given it - great way to get exposure.

I would also try to simplify your folder structure as 9 levels deep is very deep and likely to make Googles crawl of your images less efficient. I don't understand the reasoning of an individual image per folder - something more like images segmented by subject or even month like default WordPress would make more sense.

Do you have an image sitemap in place? If not here is some more info from Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en

Hope this helps

Matt

As Brian said it is really important to make sure that your business name, address and phone number (NAP) match on your Google My Business Page and your business landing page (website). There are also many other important factors that you can use to optimise your local presence and re-gain that A spot. Have you got your business listed in local relevant directories and do your NAP details match across the board? There are so many factors for optimising your business for Local I would recommend that you have a look at Local Search Ranking Factors 2014 - http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

If you have any specific questions once you have had a look at these ranking factors just reply to this thread or drop another question to the community and you are sure to get some great help.

I find consistency is key and you need to make sure you push forward with optimising all the different factors that will benefit your business locally.

As Donald says you can rewrite content for each location and give it a location specific flavor.

One thing I would also recommend when working on something like this is spend the time trying to get some user generated content such a reviews and testimonials. This will give it a more unique local feel.

If each location has similar products but not exactly the same could you slightly vary product focus and weight of content accordingly.

I don't know you setup or budget but you could even look to get different writers for different locations. You may even look to get different business owners/franchise managers to have input on the content for their site. In some situations you may even have some keen to write some content that you can proof/edit.

Hope this helps

Meta descriptions don't affect your rankings in search engines - they just help entice people to click on your results in the search engines - have a look here for further peace of mind - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

So you can change them at anytime and it won't affect your rankings.

I would start by signing up to Bing webmaster central in there under Crawl Control you can set what rate and time of day your site is crawled, bearing in mind that if it is left on standard it will take a long time to crawl and index your site - if you have a large e-commerce site this will definitely cause an issue - I would look at turning this up "full volume" as it shouldn't have any negative effects. Though keep an eye on the impact this has on the load of your server - most reasonable setups will handle this fine. Another very good indicator of any issues your site might have with being indexed by Bing, in the Bing Webmaster Central, is the fetch as Bingbot tool which will allow you to drop a URL in from your site and it will show you what comes back from Bings point of view. If there was something that was hindering it such as a robots.txt it would inform you.

Join Bing Webmaster Central now and see what information it provides you with your site if you haven't already done this.

Also be aware of the Queries per second limit allowed on your server as this has been known to hinder/stop Bing indexing a site when they haven't been able to access the content sufficiently when preforming a crawl especially on larger sites which are constantly being refreshed and updated.

Doing this will lead to keyword cannibalization, so I would recommend you have a read of this post from Rand in regards to the issue for a greater understanding

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

If I were you I would aim to make each of the title tags different...