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I have a client that has individual pages for authorized dealers of their product (say "Car Dealers").  When you search for "brand name + location", Google returns 7 "dealership" pages from the parent company's domain as the first 7 results, but there is one that gets pushed off to the 5th page of the SERPs.  The formatting of content, geo-targeting, and meta data on the page is identical on every single one. None of them have external links and there is not one extremely distinguishable thing to assess why the one page doesn't get placed on that first SERP. Why is the one getting pushed so far down? I know this may be a bit confusing, but any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

We recently acquired an e-commerce client that uses X-Cart.  We have no previous experience with this platform and it's hard to find any good / helpful info regarding SEO functionality online. Right now I need to figure out how to handle mass redirects of 404 errors, friendlier URLs, resolving duplicate content, XML sitemap generation, robots.txt generation.  The functionality built into the platform so far is terrible and all of the modules are pricey. Any recommendations, general or specific, would be insanely helpful if anybody out there has experience with this particular platform. Thanks!

What are the benefits / disadvantages of geo-targeting content based on IP address.  A client is interested in serving up different content on their homepage based on what area the user is coming from.  This seems like an SEO nightmare to me as search engine spiders could potentially see different content depending on when they visit.  Is there a best practices here? Or is it looked down upon in regards to SEO?  Any information would be helpful.

I use Screaming Frog and Xenu on a daily basis and I use them for sitemap creation, but the functionality is limited.  With huge sites, it's really easy to create an ordered list of URLs for the sitemap in excel or word and upload that to Screaming Frog to crawl.  The only problem is that it won't export the sitemap in the order that I uploaded it.  Does anybody know of a tool that will do this or am I doomed to sit an manually arrange the URLs the way I want?

I'm working with a message board that has been around for 10+ years and never taken SEO best practices into consideration.  They recently started seeing mobile URLs show up in regular results, which they don't want.  I'm recommending they implement multiple sitemaps to properly indicate to Google how to crawl the site and what to index.  I've never dealt with a site this large so I'm not sure best practices.  They have a HUGE community and new URLs are created every second.  Doing a site: search returns "About 12,100,000" URLs.  What are some best practices /  the best way to approach sitemaps for a site of this size?

I have a client that has been paying someone for what is basically directory placement on very specific niche sites that they have created. These sites are exact match keyword domains with not very high PA or DA (they're in the teens) and they provide no direct traffic. It's basically a link wheel that is probably helping them to rank for some of their bigger holy grail keywords. They are also providing some low quality article/blog marketing on these sites. Ultimately, they link to them ALOT and it's working in this specific niche. This client no longer wants to pay for these services, but there's the possibility of all of the links being taken down and their rankings being set back a ton. Has anybody ever experienced this and if so, how did you deal with it? What are some good tactics? Any tips would be great.

I have a client with a very big site that includes a blog, videos, photo gallery, etc.  Is it best to create a separate xml file for each of these sections?  It seems to me like that would be the best way to keep everything organized.  Or at least separate the blog out from the main site.  Does anybody have any tips or recommendations? I'm not finding any good information about this.

I have a client that ranks 2nd for a google local result, and the local results are the first set of results being displayed, making it in fact the 2nd result on the page for the keyword.  There aren't any blended results on this page, it's straightforward local results, then universal results directly after.  They are concerned that they are not appearing in the universal results high enough (they're on page 5 with a different url than the homepage).  I'm not sure why their #2 local ranking isn't good enough since those are consistently the same results, but I have to ask; Can you appear in both local and universal results on the same page?

I've recently encountered a site that has set a crawl-delay command set in their robots.txt file.  I've never seen a need for this to be set since you can set that in Google Webmaster Tools for Googlebot.  They have this command set for all crawlers, which seems odd to me.  What are some reasons that someone would want to set it like that?  I can't find any good information on it when researching.

We have a client who is taking their web server down Saturday morning from 1am - 7am for planned maintenance. Initially, we thought to have all requests return a 503 (service unavailable) response but the web server itself will be down so we are not able to have it return any response codes. Updating the DNS on the registrar will have too much lag time while it propogates out so we aren't sure exactly how to handle this. I had thought possibly of using a second DNS, or a service like DynDNS but that seems like a large amount of effort to set up just for some planned downtime. I have to imagine that Google understands planned website/server downtime every once in a great while. This client has pretty good rankings for some incredibly competitive terms so we want to do all that we can to make sure those rankings are preserved. What are some other potential solutions? We could totally just be overthinking this but we'd rather be safe than sorry... Thanks in advance!

The SEOmoz crawler picks up "search" pages on a site as having duplicate page titles, which of course they do.  Does that mean I should put a "Disallow: /search" tag in my robots.txt?  When I put the URL's into Google, they aren't coming up in any SERPS, so I would assume everything's ok.  I try to abide by the SEOmoz crawl errors as much as possible, that's why I'm asking.  Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks!

We recently launched a new website and it doesn't consist of that many pages.  When you do a "site:" search on Google, it shows 1,950 results.  Obviously we don't want this to be happening.  I have a feeling it's effecting our rankings.  Is this just a straight up robots.txt problem?  We addressed that a while ago and the number of results aren't going down.  It's very possible that we still have it implemented incorrectly.  What are we doing wrong and how do we start getting pages "un-indexed"?

I'm putting together a link prospecting csv (very basic/simple).  I'm doing my own manual hunting for link prospects and compiling them in a list in that excel doc.  Once I'm done with that, I want to pull OSE data on a larger scale (MozRank, PA, DA, etc.). I know Niel Bosma's SEO tools for Excel exists, but I have a Mac, and it's not available for that.  And I can't really pay for any of the big tools right now (ie BuzzStream).  Does anybody know of a good tool or way of going about pulling this data in a way that will save time?  As opposed to pulling data for each URL one by one.  ANY tips would be GREATLY appreciated.

Do Facebook Open Graph tags get spidered by Google?  I have a site I'm looking at and they've implemented these tags on the entire site, but with the same title and description on every page.  I'm assuming if you use these tags, give each page their own unique tags.  But do these have an effect on rankings at all?  Does googlebot see them and take them into account?

Local SERPS continue to confuse me.  I feel like I can tell what's going on but I'm never right.  How do these two listings rank for "best bar" in the local Chicago SERPS?  It's the same if you search for "best bar in chicago". http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&biw=2109&bih=1218&noj=1&gs_upl=3495l4209l0l4335l8l5l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar&fb=1&gl=us&hq=best+bar&hnear=0x880e2c3cd0f4cbed:0xafe0a6ad09c0c000,Chicago,+IL&cid=17128325649974296516 or http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&biw=2109&bih=1218&noj=1&gs_upl=3495l4209l0l4335l8l5l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar&fb=1&gl=us&hq=best+bar&hnear=0x880e2c3cd0f4cbed:0xafe0a6ad09c0c000,Chicago,+IL&cid=455944883716881589&ei=aQPqTo7mN4mIgwe4oc3fCA&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=placepage-link&resnum=5&ved=0CFgQ4gkwBA This has had me stumped for months.  I've analyzed everything and there aren't any good indicators as to how this was done.  The former doesn't even have a website.  The latter example has some category keyword stuffing, which I don't get why they're account hasn't been suspended because of it.  It also has a very small and not very powerful link profile. Any insights would be much appreciated!

If you're optimizing an e-commerce site where you sell a certain brand of product, can you re-use the product descriptions from that brand's store? For example, if I'm selling Nike's, can I use the product descriptions and info from the Nike product pages? (This is not what I'm selling).  Or should you write your own descriptions.  I understand that original content is best, but in an online store situation, how do you write up a product description that's different from the original?  It is what it is, right?

I know what tools to use and I use all of SEOmoz's tools daily.  PA, DA, MR, & MT are all things I take into account, but sometimes all you have to do is look at a site and you can tell it's not worth it.  I'll analyze the page's backlink's and everything in between.  Are there any tricks out there that can help the decision making process?  I'm tired of trying to get links on sites that clearly are not worth it, but all of their stats say otherwise.  So do you stick with stats, or is it a judgement call? I'm particularly curious about determining the amount of possible traffic from a link. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

What kind of research tactics are the best for finding great ideas for content or articles?  What tools are the most helpful?

We've tried multiple management systems, with the last one being Raven Tools (I think this is the most popular).  We've also done our own manual tracking in excel and that gets very very tedious and sometimes hard to  keep track of.  What are some other ones that people have found that have been easy to use and made their work much more efficient (link building/tracking, reporting, competitive research, social, etc.)?

I've listed an example below.  I see these all the time, where a directory pulls it's listings from DMOZ.  So you would naturally assume that if you're in DMOZ, you would get these links, but that's not the case.  This particular link was picked up by OSE so I'm wondering what the quality of these links really are and if they're legit?  Also, if you go to the main subdomain the page just says "Buy shirts".  What is the deal with these types of so-called "directories"? http://www.searches.org/go/search/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/Furniture/ Another example: http://www.westcairn.com/furniture.htm

"Best Bar In Chicago" - http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar+in+chicago They have only 5 Google reviews, and their local directory reviews are suspect.  One of them goes to rateclubs.com and it's not even a page for their business, while one of them doesn't have user reviews, it's just an editorial review.  The other one at superpages.com doesn't even link back to their site, it links to their restaurants.com profile.  What is going on here? I've been trying to figure this out for a while as their first place ranking has been solidified for quite some time now.  I can also tell you that a few of the bars listed below them have a MUCH higher profile and are better known.  You can see that just by the reviews.

I know that's vague, so let me specify.  I recently got a client on the second page for a relatively difficult 2 word keyword.  That is when the location is set to Chicago, Il in Google and private browsing in Chrome (so I'm not logged in).  This is great because Chicago is the more important location (the client is located there and that's what his location is when he searches in Google).  But when he goes home to the suburbs and searches, the ranking completely disappears.  Why would he rank in a much more desired location such as Chicago vs a suburb way out of the city?  Is that something you can control or target in terms of optimization?  It's difficult trying to explain why this is happening to clients.

Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO?  I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider?  Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these?  There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.

What are the best ways to help influence your products rankings in Google Shopping SERPS?  Aside from the obvious factors (ie Product Title, Description, brand, etc), what are the key factors in optimizing your products?

Google is randomly displaying the alt image tag as the page title for my homepage.  It happens when you search for the brand name, but the page title appears as "BrandName Logo" (obviously not "BrandName").  Has anybody seen this happen before?

I have someone who's come to me and said that they have lost all of their organic keyword rankings.  They did launch a site redesign a few months back so that could be a reason as to why.  But after looking at the site, link profile, etc.  It doesn't look like they could have been ranking for the terms they say they were.  They have never implemented any SEO on their sites btw.  I did not build this site and have not done any SEO, they are coming to me to solve the problem.  I did notice in SEM rush that a couple months ago they were ranking organically for more terms (20 in July vs. 5 now), so they did lose some.  Is there any way to see what terms they WERE ranking for?

Why would a page title not be displayed in the SERPS?  Everything appears to be formatted correctly in the code, yet the title of the company gets displayed instead of the page title?  Any general idea why this could be happening?

I re-wrote the page title of a home page for a site I'm working on and made sure it's under 70 characters (68 to be exact) to comply with best practices and make sure it doesn't get cut-off in the SERPS.  It's still getting cut-off though and right when it gets to the brand/website name.  Does a "-" have anything to do with it?  Does that translate to an elipsis? Format: keywords - website/brand.com Can anybody tell me why this would be happening?

As of yesterday's OSE update alot of sites that I'm tracking saw their PA & DA drop significantly.  This was for multiple sites, whereas last month's index saw those stats increase significantly.  Has anybody else seen this happen to them and perhaps drawn any conclusions?

What's the best way to go about creating new pages for geo targeted keywords for a business?  I ask because, these keywords are areas that they provide service to, but the brick and mortar business is not located.  I've already run into problems trying to put too many locations onto one page.  What's the best way to attack content for these new pages in order to get these geo keywords in there?

What changes to a website constitute resubmitting a sitemap?  For example, if I add new in-site links, should I then resubmit?  Or is it more for changes to URLs, Page titles, etc?

What do you do if you have a client that never implemented a 301 redirect on their domain?  For example here are the OSE stats for the URLs; http://url.com PA: 48 DA: 50 LRD: 65 TL: 1,084 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 http://www.url.com PA: 51 DA: 50 LRD: 165 TL: 2,271 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 G+1:3 My first instincts are to redirect the first one to the second one, but is it too late for that?  Will that screw up all of their established stats?  Any input or examples of past experiences with this would be great.

How come links sometimes show up in OSE or Yahoo Site Explorer and then when you go to the page, they're not there anymore?  Why is a link indexed or considered active but is no longer on the page?

I set a little bit of time aside for each client to comment on blogs for backlinks, but it just seems like a waste of time at this point.  Most blogs have comments turned off, or won't allow links.  Obviously making your name a keyword and making that a link is very spammy, and alot of blogs are using Disqus or making you login with your facebook account to post a comment.  What's the best way of going about this these days, or is it not even worth the time?

I'm in negotiations to get links placed on a popular blog with good stats.  I'm allowed to pick older posts on the site, and I get to pick the anchor text.  Is it best practice to diversify the links by having different keywords pointing to different pages or am I better off pointing as many links as I can at one page (varying anchor text)? Also, is it best to pick a more recent blog post, or is it ok to pick one from say, 2009?

When creating links within your website, is it bad to have a anchor text link pointing back to the same page? Say the page the homepage is optimized for "credit cards".  If I have a "credit cards" anchor text link on the page the link points to, is that bad practice? Secondly, if it's better to put that link on a different page, wouldn't I be placing a keyword that's optimized for a different page on the wrong page? (hopefully I'm making sense) Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

I made some on-site changes to a site last week, in particular their page titles.  This was all done on the same day at the same time.  Now, one of those pages, got re-indexed  on August 8th and has my updated changes, which also helped with my ranking.  The other page I made changes to still shows a cached version from July 27th, which is before I made the changes.  Why wouldn't google have an updated page from August 8th for both pages, not just one?

Currently, I list every root word (one word) I can think of for the client.  Then start a 2 word keyword section, making every possible connection with my root words.  Then move to 3 word, 4 word, and so on.  I do this all in a word document and by hand.  Does anybody have ANYTHING (tool/strategy) that does something similar?  I'm looking for anything that can expedite this process.  My manual method makes me feel like I'm always forgetting certain combinations of words.

Does it matter if a canonical tag points to the URL in which the tag is on? Example Page: http://www.domain.com Canonical tag: rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com" /> I only ask because a client of mine has a CMS that automatically does that to every page on the site and there's no way to remove it.  Will this have a negative impact or does it not matter at all?  Any insights would be great because I can't find a clear answer anywhere online. Thanks!

We were recently tasked with finding out the traffic information for international versions of a particular website.  We use tools such as Compete and SEMrush, but these are only based on US visitors to those international sites.  Is there a tool out there where you can actually see competitive search data in specific countries?

What do you think is the most appropriate/efficient amount of keywords to target per page for a website?  Obviously, it may depend on the type/size of the site, but I've noticed different results with different clients.  Early on, I targeted way too many keywords per page, then scaled them back as I learned more.  I'm almost starting to think that you should just target 1-2 keywords per page to be efficient and more natural.  Thoughts?