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Hey Damon,

I sent you an email with a couple of suggestions for your site, things I think may have possible slipped through the net during your redesign, I hope that helped!

Also, re: press releases, as someone that owns a Google news approved PR site, I can give you another angle on this if you like?

I agree with what everyone here has said about quality for a start! One of the more traditional uses of a press releases is obviosuly to get the word out... these days some folks try to submit crappy spun articles as press releases. A visit for somewhere like the warrior forums will show you people using, and selling, that tactic.

As a PR site owner that just means more work on our part, declining trash releases, and banning IP's from our system! Not everyone does this though, obviously the big sites do (prweb etc) but some of the smaller, free PR sites don't have much of an approval process.

What that can mean for you, is that you may end up with your news release on a site promoting questionable products and linking to questionable sites. Whilst I doubt this would be bad enough to cause you much harm, it may not be the panacea that you could be hoping for!

If you go down the PR site route on a regular basis, try to opt for sites that have some level of quality control, look for ones that are Google news approved, and also ones that will show your full contact details, ideally including a link back to your site.

Write decent releases, and when you write an especially good one, take it offline too! Send it to your local papers and press.

Regarding the local papers and press, if you want a higher success rate, pick up the phone, call the papers, and ask them who deals with small business news. Explain you have an interesting press release you would like to send them, and ask who the best person to send it to is.

Doing the above can help your success rate pretty massively, as instead of going to a generic, contact@blah type email, then having to be sent around the block, you should go straight to the eyes of someone that is most likely to be interested.

This is only worth doing if you have something to shout about. A relaunch MAY do it, winning some local award, or sponsoring a local charity or something almost certainly should! Look for local charity events to throw a few $ towards for sponsorship, offer a training day to local school kids, anything like that should be good enough to get the attention of the local press. If a reporter does interview you, explain that you would love a nice, clean SEO friendly link from the body of anything they publish online Give them lots of coffee, to keep em happy!

The effect on your local rankings, if you manage to get a clean link from a quality local paper and some follow up news coverage, may well help you to get above the spammy sounding guys above you.

Follow that up with some LOCAL (real local, not spammy ones) directory submissions, some 'social love' and some online press releases, and you may well secure a decent position in time.

Anyway that was a bit of a long un, but I wanted to give you an idea of how you  could, pretty ethically, out do the guys above you, and also use online and offline PR the right way

Obviously online PR gets used in all sorts of ways, and at the end of the day so long as what you submit is unqiue, well written and interesting, it should probably get approved, what I describe above is something that can give a nice bonus in addition, to help with your results (especially local ones), when you have a news worthy event to shout about.

There's no hard & fast answer really, as it depends on your situation.

Personally, I'm a big fan of blogs in a subfolder on ecommerce sites. It gives you a great platform for publishing content that's useful to your target audience at various stages of their sales cycle.

For example, educating people about different solutions to a problem, guides on how to do stuff...

Not sure of the exact niche within gamers you sit, but, for example, a post with a detailed guide to streaming on Twitch, including photographs:

• That shows how to set-up OBS (Open Broadcaster Software),
• Explains the best settings in OBS are for Twitch (I know from experience people DO struggle with this part),
• Details how to set-up chat boxes and donation boxes etc in-stream,
• What your options are in terms of Headset/mic,
• What to look for in a webcam and how to do picture-in-picture style streaming (with an explanation of why this is good... It increases followers & encourages engagement etc)
• Detail external streaming hardware (Elgato boxes etc)

All of this will be VERY useful for any gamer wondering how to get into streaming and what hardware and software they need. Of course all the info is already available, but a lot of it is scattered across the web. Make it easy for folks and create an 'ultimate guide' style post.

Provide really uber-useful guides like this (varying depending on your exact sector), mix it in with genuine hardware reviews and comparisons... get a few mid-tier gamers to do hardware reviews on your blog too... and your blog may become someone's 'go-to' place for advice on gaming hardware, software and configuration. The benefits of this happening are that you may get subscribers to mailing lists, plus the brand trust - compared with JUST having an ecommerce store, will be huge.

You can also lock content with an email gate (e.g. in the Streaming example, offer a cheatsheet checklist that goes along with the post, in exchange for their email)... But personally? I'd be sure, if you do this, to have PLENTY of decent, helpful posts first. People will be more willing to give you their email once they know they can trust you. It's a value exchange and the onus is on YOU to provide the value first

The brand trust you should earn from this sort of work will likely increase your conversion rate considerably, as people prefer to buy from who they trust. On the subject of conversion rate, if you've not seen it yet, watch this: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-craft-the-best-damn-ecommerce-page-on-the-web-whiteboard-friday 

The only thing is, if you don't think you can support this level of quality on a blog, don't do it.

However, bear in mind that you DO NOT need to product 'x' posts a week... What dictates the amount you publish should be the capacity you have for producing stellar content. Better to publish less, but better. Also take the time to think about amplification of the content. Lots of good info here on Moz and other places.

Also, are there any folks you can partner with? Gamers who could get involved with the blog in exchange for gear or discounts?

Bump for this too! Jon's answer seemed quite positive... any more news?

The best advice is, as you say, to be 'natural'. Hard to 'emulate' a natural backlink profile? - Then I hate to say it, but try to earn some natural backlinks

Add UGC to product pages (reviews etc), try to make product pages (assuming this is an eCommerce site!) more interesting (soem great stuff on MOZ about this - including a whiteboard Friday from a while back, I think!).

If you ARE 'building' links, I would recommend avoiding exact match anchors. In terms of what anchor text % to use for each type, and what would look natural, I very strongly suspect that this is different in each industry/niche. Google is pretty good at spotting what other websites any given site is 'related' to, and so would also be able to calculate what, on average, looks dodgy and what looks natural. I would be very surprised if this data didn't at least influence it's algorithm's a little.

Who ranks at the top in your industry? What sort of anchor text do they have pointing to similar sub-pages? - Check this for 3 or 4 top-ranking sites in your sector.

Link like a Journo or blogger

Consider using a mix of brand, url, and natural anchors such as in-sentence links (read a few New York Times blogs to see how they handle citation links (or follow the example i just made! hahaha). Whilst on the NYT blog, why not follow the links from the NYT blogs to their destination URL, and then run an OSE check on those URLs? That will likely show you other examples of natural linking

The long term goal should be to earn links, not build them - I accept this can be a tough call though!

Very good answer by EGOL. Quality over quantity any day. As for being awesome content, remember that it should be awesome content that answers the needs, questions etc of your target audience.

Also, remember that to be truly effective, your content should speak to your demographic at different stages in their buying cycle. From 'Discovery' pieces, through to comparison articles etc, always be mindful when writing an article who you're targeting the content to, what stage of the funnel they are likely to be, and how you can HELP them understand the issues and move on to the next stage. Sounds like a lot of work, but once you get into the workflow, it's worth it.

For content ideas, think of questions too - If you've been in an industry for a while, you may already know what common questions come up - use this! It's gold. Also, if you have any sales folks (or any customer-facing folks) ask THEM what questions they get asked by customers most often - keep a list, look for trends and there you have an ideas list for your articles. This is just one idea - there's loads of great advice out there on the web for this sort of thing. Check some Whiteboard Fridays on content topics too, there's some good ones from what I remember.

I'd then mix really stellar content with some outreach. Be careful with outreach though, be smart and always think of adding value. Can you partner with any businesses in the articles? Can you write any guides that mention other (non-competing) businesses and produce or co-authored piece that'll be shared to both your social audiences & email lists? If you do base an article on customer questions, would the customers be happy to be mentioned in the piece (always ask!) as if so, perhaps they'll share it? (who better to help you reach more

If you do base an article on customer questions, - always as permission - but, would the customers be happy to be mentioned in the piece ( "Joe Blogs from [town] raised a great question which lead to this article...] as if so, perhaps they'll share it? (who better to help you reach more customers, than your existing happy customers).

Anyway, just a few ideas.

Hmmm looking at the first 2 pages, I think I can see what's happening here

Not 100% on how Moz's tool figures out dupe content, but I think this is why (3rd point is strongest, I think):

• Similar URLs (first part up to the last folder, then first word, then both ending in 2016) means the URL is a close match
• The title tags are also quite similar
• Perhaps most importantly, it does look like the VAST MAJORITY of the content on the page is in fact duplicate of other pages. It's not obvious at first BUT... To see what I mean, click on the 'Guidelines' tab (looks like jQuery tabs or similar) and we get a big amount of content - the most on the page - that's duplicated between both pages.

Perhaps consider making that a link to a dedicated page that has this content, opening in a new tab or similar?

For your 2nd two examples, check the 'About Your Instructor' and 'FAQs'. I'd advise that where content is repeated over & over, move it to it's own page and then link to it from there, rather than having the same several hundred words indexed on many pages.

Hope that helps?

Ps. There may be a better solution for displaying the content, iframing it into the tab etc, but if you go down that route be careful, it's an effort to make iframes responsive!

Veronica (my keyboard doesn't do accents I don't think! Lo siento Veronica!) gave a good answer, I just wanted to add...

With internal links, if you're using WP or another CMS platform, there are plugins that do 'related posts', 'top posts', and even 'top comments', all of which could, in theory, send extra internal link juice to the pages. Though, many of these plugins would return the most popular/recent etc, not necessarily the pages you want

An approach I'd consider is manually finding posts that are related to the posts you're looking to give a little boost, and see if it'd make sense (from a content perspective) to link from any of the related posts you've found, back to your target posts. You may want to use an in-content link, or could even add a small 'recommended post' promo area - within or under the related post.

• Also, as you publish new content, remember to internally link to the target posts where it makes sense.
• You've mentioned content relaunches, did you update the last-modified meta (if it exists) or last-modified header?

Can the on-page SEO be improved at all? When you get to the first 2 pages, small improvements can yield results, so:

• Can the standard SEO be improved? (Go back to SEO 101, check things like filenames of images on the page, alt tags, what about subheadings? do you use < strong > when you could use < h2 > or < h3 >?).
• Page load times - can you optimise the images to increase load speed? What about page bloat (CSS/JS from old plugins - cleaning that will help the entire site!)
• Structured data - can you add any Schema markup? (article etc)
• Click through rates from SERPs... Can you improve the title tag (careful!) or meta description to try to get a higher CTR from the SERPs? As you get closer to the top, this gets more important (in my opinion/conjecture not fact)

That's all I can think of off-hand.

Two possible places, depending on specifically what you need? (correct me if I am wrong Roger!)

1) Go to your campaigns page, View the campaign in question. In the top-nav, next to 'Overview' and 'Rankings' you should find 'Crawl Diagnostics'.

In this section, you should be able to view crawl related issues/errors warnings etc. Be sure to notice the dropdown near the top-left of the page - You should be able to export reports etc here also.

2) The tab in the top-nav NEXT to the 'Crawl Diagnostics; link is 'On-Page' - Here you should be able to view, and trigger, on-page SEO reports... Again, you should be able to download reports from here too (top right of the page).

Does this help?

Cheers,

Mike.

EDIT - Added an image for you, hope this helps!

seomoz-reports.png

I took the liberty of running a report on that URL for you (majestico tool) and found: 73,704 backlinks from 349 referring domains to that URL.

I found 68,727 backlinks with the anchor: tv stands

If you want an Excel file of the backlinsk I found, let me know where to send it, and I will fire it over to you, if that helps. (I suggest NOT posting your email in public view though!)

So I think that may have something to do with it!

Some awesome answers from folks here - Giving them all a thumbs-up now!

Just to add a bit to the above (so meant as suggestions in addition to the above)... I'd also monitor the up-comers backlinks, press mentions etc. (Patrick mentioned checking what they are doing... I'd go a step further and monitor it on-going as some stuff may not be showing if it was done recently).

Of course, it's important not to be too 'copy-cat', I wouldn't focus JUST on this, but if you listen to the advice above, I'd mix in some competitive analysis of PR (public relations/press, not the old green bar!) of the competitor, mentions and links etc.

• You can use Moz's, like OSE (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) and look for 'just discovered' and also 'link opportunities' (to find mentions etc of your competitors)
• Set up a Google Alert (https://www.google.co.uk/alerts I like to do an alert for their brand name, minus their domain, set to 'as it happens', and be sure to set to 'all results' rather than just what Google thinks is the best of the results) - See screenie added to this post for an example. You can also opt to publish this to an RSS feed, rather than get emails - then use a feed reader (Chrome dashboard plugin with a few feeds is what I use! - Handy for the start to the day with a coffee, just review the updated RSS feeds).

Keep an eye on them, see what they're up to and figure out if any of it can feed into your work. Maybe they register on a decent industry site and start contributing content, can you do the same, only publish better content & promote it? Perhaps they get links from a supplier - do you use the same supplier? Don't copy them for the sake of it of course, just where it makes sense. It can also help to inform your strategy.

It sounds like you have your SEO pretty well sorted (ranking high for head terms), so how about reviewing:

• CTR from SERPs... can you optimise your click through by tweaking title tag (carefully! don't lose rankings) and/or meta description
• Page speeds - can you get the pages that rank to load faster?
• Internal links - when did you last run an internal link audit? Remember, when it comes to the top-slots in the SERPs, little things matter! If you've published any content in the last few months, see if it makes sense for internal links from there to the ranking pages (don't force it though!).
• Can you rank in position 0? < Are there any SERP features for the keywords (or related ones - Keyword Explorer to the rescue!) If there are SERP features, can you optimise for them?

Hope that gives a few things to think about?

VObgrQB.png

When you say 'submit all of your product pages' - Do you mean submit them to Google's organic search engine, or Google Shopping?

For the organic search engine, depending on how many pages you really have, I would say you should submit xml sitemaps, and you may need to submit a sitemap index too (check the current max. limit on a single sitemap submission, I am not sure what it is these days!).

Personally though, with a good navigation system and a few backlinks, you shouldn't need to worry 'too much' about submitting xml sitemaps.

As you say the product pages are updated daily though, I can see why you feel the need to do this.

Or, did you mean submitting them to...

Google Shopping

If you have lots of products, I would strongly recommend submitting them to Google Shopping - it's free, after all!

This should help you to get some 'quick wins' whilst you work at getting your products and category pages ranking well in the organic results.

**Canonicalisation **

As you are running an ecom. store, with lots of products - be very careful with canonical and duplication issues, especially since Google Panda! Ensure that query strings in your URLs don't result in multiple URLs for the same products, likewise make sure if you have products in multiple categories, that you are not creating duplicate content/URLs that way either! - I guess you have this covered already?

What I'd recommend (both as a long term SEO and someone who's used Moz for years), is first book an onboarding session with Moz. I've been using the Moz suite for many years, but recently booked one, just out of curiosity really! (and to see if I had any knowledge gaps with regards what the Moz tools can do).

Don't expect strategy advice from Moz, of course, but sitting through a short onboarding session will really help you get to grips with the Moz tools and:

1. Mean you need to pay a consultant for less time training on Moz's tools (so your money can be directed more to strategy & advice, rather than learning the tools)
2. As you'll be a bit more comfortable with the Moz tools, you'll likely understand what the consultant you hire is talking about better
3. Without meaning to be rude to anyone, you'll also find it easier to spot those who can and cannot help you.

I'm not pitching for the work or anything here btw (am booked out solid with project work for the next few months, so couldn't even if I wanted to!), I just though the above might be a good way forward for you.

On the whole, I agree with what Will Quick says.

I do believe that even in niches that others are using comment spam, you CAN outrank them with quality work (I have done it, in fact)... and in the end, you will have a stronger backlink profile that should outlast the spam guys when G- updates roll out in the future (as they always do!).

That said, I strongly agree with Will, in that a sudden change in the style of backlink profile can in fact cause an issue and ranking drop - especially in the mid-long term.

Basically you have just suffered from 1 or 2 things, or both (in my opinion anyway!).

Number 1: You may well be suffering from an inbound link filter/penalty due to the spam. This can be due to spammy links, or over use of a given anchor text (what % of inbound links to the page that was ranking, and also to the domain, use the exact match anchor?).  This could be an issue EITHER becuase of the spam links, OR because of over-optimisation of a set keyword (has the ranking suffered for other pages/keyterms???

Number 2: The link velocity to the domain as a whole, and also to the page(s) in question, has probably just taken a MASSIVE drop (by the sounds of it). Such a drastic change in itself can cause issues and ranking drops (in my opinion!). At least in the short to mid term - That said, continued, high quality SEO work 'should' re-gain you those positions, and build a better foundation for the future (safer with future big G updates).

Now, to fix Number 1, above, may take time. I feel that you need to pull off reports of the current anchor text usage to the domain, and to specific pages, and try to ensure that nothing is too 'over the top'. Try to get some nice brand links to water down any high anchor text usages (to page/domain).

To fix Number 2 may be trickier. You could either:

A) Use spam for a while, and decrease it steadily, whilst increasing the quality work (I do NOT recommend this, but that is just because it is not how I like to work, I feel it pollutes the web).

B) Ride it out! - Gain steady, high quality links via press releases, blogger outreach, articles, web 2.0 work, social media baiting. Also consider an increase in PPC in the interim, to keep the $£ coming in! Done right, this should help to regain positions.

C) Do 'B)', above, but also try to be creative in 'simulating' the sort of link velocity that the spammers, perhps some decent infographics with brand links in the embed code, social media baiting, press release syndication, and at a push, mass article submission (with decent quality articles) is still less spammy than blog comments! (although not ideal for long term tactics, it may help to simulate the link velocity). Basically check the amount of extra unique linking domains that the spam work gained the site, and try to get at least somewhere near that level using non-spam tactics, and slowly reduce the amount to a more realistic monthly amount, but with higher quality work.

I think that you should be open with the client, and tell them that although they may suffer now, it is probably much better to do this now than to wait until they get penalised.

This way, they just need to come up with an intelligent strategy to recover, whereas if they kept up with the spam work, they may well end up in real hot water!

**That is just my opinion anyway, and it is without knowing the exact situation, so should be taken as general opinion, not a well researched tactic! **

brevityworks, best of luck!

I would check the quality of the content (human readability and usefulness) and then, so long as all is good with the on-page SEO as you say it is, I would ensure I have social bookmarking buttons in prominant places, and open accounts on the major social sites (twitter, Facebook etc) and try to make it as easy as possible for folks to bookmark the content.

I would spend just 30mins initially following a few people that appear interested in the industry.

Then:

If it is an ecommerce site, take a feed from the mysql database, and modify it for Google Base (quick once you know how). If the site used an open source shopping cart/CMS, then there is likely a plugin/modification for free or cheap to do this instead of going into the database directly, as so this could be automated.

Also if it is an ecommerce store, I would ensure the h1's are showing correctly on every product page, and that there is GREAT (and I mean GREAT) navigation throughout the site (in fact, this goes for most sites, not just Ecommerce ones).

If it is a site that's based on a blogging platform (wordpress etc) then I would check the RSS feeds, and submit them to decent RSS sites, to aid indexing.

Follow that by looking for some guest post availability, write and submit a decent press release about the new site launch (be sure to submit to Google News sources!) and finish off by doing an hours extra work over a coffee, drawing up some flow diagrams of the next steps. Part of this final step would be working out how much time I could realistically spend each week or month on tasks for this website.

Phew, that's a fair bit for 8 hrs, but it is realistic if you get your head down, and keep the coffee flowing.

I hope this helps, but I bet some guys and gals will disagree with what I have said! Still, each to their own!

Yup, all looks good now - the page has index, follow

I'm going to send you a private message here on Moz with a Screaming Frog crawl export, which I carried out just to check there were no instances of 'noindex' left on any pages... All looks fine from the noindex standpoint.

• Screaming frog! All day long

I love SF, it's amazing. I have the paid version (as I use it a lot) but their free too is good too. For smaller sites, the free tool is absolutely fine. It's not som crappy demo that has most features blocked or anything, it's very usable. Their paid version

Their paid version I'd put under 'low cost' for what you get too. Love the fact you can ingore robots.txt, great for testing dev sites.

One thing I REALLY like about SF (vs SaaS based online tools), is the ability to edit my hosts file & add a dev domain, then run SF on the site, even though it's on localhost - A benefit of desktop tools).

Then there's:

• **Google Analytics **- I like to create custom dashboards for various things, such as segmenting mobile vs desktop, PPC dashboards, social dashboards etc. I think as SEOs we forget how many clients either don't realise custom dashboard exist, or don't realise how useful they can be

• Search Console / WMT (can't get out of the habit of calling it WMT!)

• Deep Crawl - Very handy. I use this, Moz's crawl and Screaming Frog for all my crawl testing needs

• Various free page-speed checks (GTmetrix, Google page speed insights, Yslow, testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com, Pingdom page speed tool also)

• OSE & Moz (not free but for what you get, I think it's low cost)

• Moz's keyword explorer (AMAZING tool. Not just saying that as this is on Moz, I genuinely think it's awesome)

• Chrome & Firefox inspectors

• Firebug

• GA plugin for Chrome

• GA debugger for Chrome (handy for testing GA events in Chrome console!)

• Check my links Chrome extension (for when you don't need a full crawl and just want to check for broken links on a page quickly in the browser)

• Google Alerts - Great for finding unlinked mentions as they happen, keeping tabs on competitors mentions & press, or even being alerted to related topics etc.

• Excel or Google Sheets - Great for a multitude of data analsys!

• access_log file - I possibly saved one of the best till last! The access_log file is great for parsing out stuff like Googlebot visits. Pop the data into a (paid) tool like Screaming Frog log file analyser, or (as I like to do) insert the data into a MySQL database and run some queries... You can find a WEALTH of tasty info, like:

• What pages get the most Googlebot activity

• Group pages together (e.g. all posts within a category, or pages under a URL folder) and calculate what % of Googlebot crawls they got

• Identify any important pages that are not getting crawlled much

• Cross-check your sitemap (in MySQL I like to select all pages from the sitemap - which I store in a MySQL table, then do a JOIN with the access_log table in the same MySQL database, then pull off a count how many times the sitemap pages were crawled, according to the access_log table. Of course the access_log needs to be for a decent time period).

These are not strictly for SEO, but useful for SEOs I think:

• **Awesome Screenshot **for Chrome - good for taking quick screenshots & annotating screenies, for devs/staff/clients etc
• Pocket - Brilliant for 'bookmarking' articles to read later... Helps me stay on-track when I'm head-down working but spot an SEO related article I want to read later... Add to pocket & close tab
• Onetab - For the times when the number of open tabs makes my mac sound like a Boeing 747 Closes all open tabs, saves them in a list for later - Can export to a file too. Handy!

Argh! That's a long list, sorry!

Bad bad idea!

As others have said, I suspect the theory here is to try to rank higher for when people use speech marks in their Google query.

In my opinion, the idea is bad for 3 reasons:

1. Hardly anyone searches like that these days - I do sometimes but only when the results without "" fail to return the results I need - or when I'm doing specific research (intitle:" " etc). Not many 'normal' users search like this

2. From a user perspective it doesn't make sense. In the body of content it would look very odd and unprofessional (unless you are citing a quote!) - Moreover using " " marks in the title tag is a bad idea - you only get a few characters for your title tag, so take FULL advantage of each character! I don't mean over-optimise keywords here either, but as well as having your primary keyword in there, use the title tag to help turn 'would-be' visitors into visitors - using " " marks in your title tag reduces the space you have to use, making it a bad idea.

3. It's a pretty blatant form of trying to manipulate results - Something that big G would likely not approve of... Ask your client if they want to gamble their online presence on something designed to 'trick' Google If they are promoting a crappy $7 affiliate product I'd maybe understand them being that silly, but if they want a long-term online business... Nah!

Kinda makes me wonder who suggested this to them! Did they enter a time-warp when they went into the meeting, going back to 2001?!

Hi Some 'bigger picture' questions to consider...

• Is the  blog a relevant, high traffic one that may send referrals?
• Does the site have a very good moderation policy, and only allow great content?
• Are you going to be providing great content that pulls the reader in and makes them want to read more?

If the answers to the above are positive ones, that I would say that it is worth writing for the site. I would recommend linking naturally, and try to negotiate Google Authorship of your posts

• Add the site to your Google Plus account in the 'contributor to' section
• Add a link back to your profile, with the correct rel=author tag

As I recently mentioned in another question a few moments ago, I would also recommend setting an advanced segment up in Google Analytics to check for referrals from the blog and, perhaps more importantly, goal conversions from visitors this blog has referred.

If you are thinking about this from a pure 'rankings' point of view, all I would really recommend is a shift in the though process Google is evolving, so it's important to do the same

Hope this helps!

One difference is targeting options.

With a ccTLD (country code top level domain), you're not able to set the target country, it defaults to the country of the ccTLD. With a gTLD (generic top level domain), you can set your target in Google's Webmaster Tools (okay, Search Console).

I guess there are branding considerations and possible effects on CTR of having a .us domain - perhaps (100% conjecture here!) some folks would be more likely to click, due to confidence the site is targeting their country (though lots of variables here, for example with a SaaS business that is global, such as an SEO tool, prob less important than, say, a clothing company that only ships to one country!).

Personally, I prefer gTLDs in MOST situations, primarily because:

• You can target the country of choice
• It's easy to target a wider, international market in the future (domain.com/es. or domain.com/mx, /it etc)
• In Search Console, with a gTLD, you can even target different countries for different subfolders (or subdomains, but I'd usually recommend subfolders).

As for Google's preference/SERP advantages? Personally, I think that using a gTLD that has it's target set in Search Console to USA, VS a ccTLD (such as a .us domain) have no advantages either way in terms of USA ranking from an algorithm standpoint - OR at least any algorithmic advantage will be negligible.

Plenty of other factors to focus on, so I'd go with your preference, but if there's a chance you'll want to target internationally in the future, think now if you'd prefer separate ccTLD domains for each country (domain.us,  domain.es, domain.it etc) or a gTLD with subfolders (domain.com/ domain.com/es, domain.com/it etc).

Others may have a differing opinion though

I'd say 2 things:

1. Have a page on your website for each location and use schema local company mark-up on each page

2. I could talk for a while about G+ Local and multi-location businesses, but this post does a good job so I';d visit that  http://moz.com/ugc/get-your-multilocation-business-ranking-in-multiple-cities-with-one-domain-21815  (Tip of the hat to Brian Gomez 

Hope that helps! Sorry the answer is so short, but Brian covers a lot of the ground I was going to write about so not point ion me repeating it here!

I have used this site before and the approval wasn't too long: http://www.information-online.com/ - They also allowed an anchored backlink, which is nice, but they appear NOT to be Google news approved.

Then I found this little list for you, but check on Google news approval if you want fast indexing (go to news.google.com, and search using the site: operator, so like: site:web-address-of-pr-sitehere.com

free-press-release.com
bignews.biz
prlog.org
live-<acronym title="Google PageRank">pr</acronym>.com
<acronym title="Google PageRank">pr</acronym>-usa.net
theopenpress.com
information-online.com
freepressrelease.com
freepressindex.com
ideamarketers.com

These guys seem to offer a free service, but maybe not with links (not sure, maybe they do allow links for free!) and they say they are Google enws approved (seem to be): http://www.prfrog.co.uk/free-press-release.html

We do also own a Google news approved PR site ourselves, so I could always do you a freebie with a link back to you if that helps Don't worry, not trying to sell you anything, just let me know if you want one published for free (would have to be well written, by you,  though!).

I am off to sleep now, but will check in tomorrow to see if you want a freebie. If not, have a bash with a couple of the ones from the list above, however these were just found via a quick Google search mainly, so I canot vouch for any of them.

Hope that helps!

Personally I wouldn't do it. No way. At the end of the day this would be very clearly against Google's terms (not to mention low-quality work), so effectively you'd be placing a bet with your site's reputation on if Google's engineers successfully catch you.

If it's a business that wants to do well in the long term online, I wouldn't take the risk of a bet like that against someone like Google, who have 'one or two' decent engineers actively trying to catch this sort of thing.

Pattern spotting is likely to catch you out and end up with you in hot water, it's just not worth the risk (in my opinion).

As John points out, for a churn & burn website this may work I guess (not something I'd be involved in tbh!), but at the end of the day if you get caught, you're a bit screwed... Plus it'd just be contributing to more crappy content out there on the web - not something any of us need!

I would recommend a multi-pronged approach.

First, though, I just want to check something.

"...has locations around the country" They are not simply adding a page per city, with lots of duplicate content, are they? (I am sure they are not, but I had to ask!).

Anyway, on to answer your question with my thoughts (for what they are worth!)...

I like Nakul's suggestions, below, about sponsorship. I would add to this, getting in touch with the local press to let them know about your sponsorships.

Next, consider joining your local chamber of commerce etc, and network with people. Get the news out about their services.

Be sure to submit to local directories (not low quality international directories, but quality, local directories).

Be SURE to use consistent data for each local directory, post cade, phone no. etc... this can help aggregators like Google Local Business Centre to pick up on citations, and attribute them to your listing.

Make sure you have filled out your Google local business profile in full, with images etc, and do the same for Bing/Yahoo.

See if there are any schools or organisations locally that will allow you to give a talk or demonstration - quite often this will include a link on their website to let people know about you before the event - if you can get local schools to do this, you could get a decent link or two from .ac.uk or .edu links, etc.

It is hard without knowing your niche, but also you could try giving a talk to a local government department (if it fits... for example if you are in the data security business, offer a free workshop to a council department, but say you want them to publish the event on their site, to ensure you get a good turnout).

If your business runs self defense classes, offer a one day free workshop to a large organisations staff, teaching womens self defense tactics... but again, you want it published on the companies website/PR section. Follow this up with a Press Release about the day to the local press & online, and use that publicity to do a similar thing for other companies.

Some of the things I have mentioned are perhaps a little more time consuming that standard 'local seo' practises, but then, the links they can gain you could give you 'the edge' on your competitors.

I must admit though, if the company doesn't actually have staff in all these cities, it makes this a little harder!

Hi Gavo.

I think I've spotted your issue!

Looking at https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/robots.txt I can see that you're all good now, HOWEVER...

view-source:https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/ Check your source code and you'll notice an inline noindex tag!:

Also, checking another page: view-source:https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/services/ I get the same meta tag.

This makes me think it's sitewide... So, as you;re running WordPress:

• In wp-admin, go to Settings > Reading, then untick the box that discourages search engines.

Once you've done that, the following optional steps won't hurt and may speed things up

• Submit a new sitemap
• Use the fetch & render, as Kevin recommends
• Personally, and this is entirely conjecture on my part, I'd use Google's page speed & mobile friendly testing tools, as I find that 'seems' to help (I've not bothered verifying by running tests & checking the access log files to bot activity etc - as it only takes a few seconds to do so not worth the time. Maybe I'll check out of curiosity at some point though!)

** As there's been a couple of errors with indexing, once you've done this change, I'd recommend running a full site crawl (Moz's tools or Screaming Frog is cool too) and check for any other noindex pages!**

EDIT: In case you don't have Screaming Frog, let me know when you've updated the WordPress setting and I'll run a crawl for you and ping you a list of any pages that are still showing noindex tags, if any exist

How long it takes to re cache is really pretty directly related to how long it is until it re-crawls the site/pages.

Like Ryan said, have you linked/confirmed the site with Webmaster Tools? You should be able to see crawl stats there.

In fact, if you have added the site, submitting an XML sitemap via your webmaster tools account like Ryan mentioned would be good, but also...

As you have redesigned the site recently, how are your writing skills?

If you can string a few paragraphs together coherently, then consider writing a press release about the site's redesign. You can find info on how to write a press release via a Google search, but basically keep it pretty professional sounding, have an intro paragraph that explains in a few words (2/3 sentances) what they whole piece is about, and finish off with an 'About [company name] section, including a link back to your site.

If you can spend an hour doing that, then submit it to 1 or 2 free press release sites (make sure they are Google news approved) and Google will find/crawl the link to your nice, newly designed site pretty quick, which should help to expediate the re-caching somewhat.

Hope that helps (please excuse any typos, its late here, and I need another coffee!)

You might also want to consider repeat custom. Having a database of repeat customers can be huge for ecommerce. Increasing lifetime value is one of the keys to success here.

A few ideas (I am assuming the CD key selling is legal, of course):

• Loyalty programmes (buy 'x' products and get 1 free, such as buy 'x' CD keys and get a random free one, obviously work your pricing to be sure you're in good profit, the freebie doesn't have to be an expensive one).
• Consider cross-selling at checkout. By offering an additional, related game at a decent discount, you may increase the average basket value considerably.
• Run seasonal promos, check Google Trends and other sources for when hotspots are (Christmas etc) and ramp-up your promotions - mailing out customers in a 'countdown' style fashion to build the PR (but monitor open rates and unsubscribes to make sure you're not annoying them!).
• Just before big game launches, piggy-back on the publicity & PR that the game generates and run discounts or contests - tie these in with you doing a video review of the game and upload to YouTube (you have a branded YouTube channel right?). Mail out to your list with the review of the new/just released game.

Other than Lifetime Value increasing:

Have you considered Twitch? Why not run a Twitch giveaway - Try to team-up with a popular streamer (if you're not well known yet, don't go for top-tier streamers at first. Find well known but approachable ones) and get them to do a sponsored CD Key giveaway. You'd need to make sure you get good coverage from the streamer (links from their chat, link from their bio for 'x' weeks, stream uploaded to their YouTube channel too if possible, with a link to your store etc).

What about asking any YouTube game streamers if you can sponsor their channel? Obviously, the likes of PewDiePie would be a bit too expensive, but aim for niche gamers with a decent following, you may be surprised how cheap you can sponsor them (CD keys?!) for links/mentions etc.

Just a few more ideas for you there, hope it helps

In my opinion...

It really depends on the context. Are you worried that the posts you remove the links on will drop rankings, or that the pages/posts they link TO will drop?

What I mean is, are the links from your posts going out to pages that you wish to get to rank? If so, are they ranking?

Or, are you cross-linking, post to post?

As an example, roughly how many links are on each post, and how many (average) words per post?

In general, I don't like to link out too much from posts, as the 'juice' passed by each link will be less, and it can look spammy.

If you pull several outbound internal links from a selection of posts, it may be wise to plan it so that not all the links point to the same pages(s), so that across the board, no single page gets a drastic drop in internal links.

Another possible tactic (taking into account, and agreeing with, what Alan said below), is that you could also pull any links that go out to pages you are not as bothered about, if you have any such outbound links on your posts. Perhaps checking your Analytics reports for the best converting pages will help you decide this (being sure to have first touch attribution installed, of course!).

Without an example though, it is kinda hard to give anything other than generic advice...

No probs Steve, glad I could help

It's a micro format of HTML.

You can use it to, for want of a better word, 'tag' your address, so basically it is a way of saying to bots that hey, you know this string of characters that follows, it is an address... there is some conjecture as to its usefulness, but I believe it is best practice to use it, especially with local search focused projects.

More info here: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

And a nice tool here: http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator

I hope that helps

Same opinion as everyone else here, it is not just about webmaster tools, you should use a 301 redirect from one versionm to the other too

As for whcih version to use, in my opionion it doesn't matter from an SEO standpoint which you use really, so it's down to a business decision based on what you feel is aesthetically more pleasing, or more useful to you. WITH ONE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION.

If you are in the situation that you have lots and lots of quality links to either version (www or non-www) then I would tend to lean towards that version. Obviously so long as you are putting a 301 redirect (are you on a linux server by the way?) then in time the weight of the links from one version (www or non-www) should be passed to the other version, via the permanently moved header status that Google will find. Even so, to keep things running smoothly, personally, I would go for a balance between what I think looks best, and which version has the most backlinks at present.

Whichever you choose, setup the 301 from the other version, to the version you go with.

I agree fully with what Ryan suggested above, if local is your target. Also consider using the hcard microformat on your address, as that can't hurt either.

It can take a while for Google to update - how long ago did you do this?

I would look here: http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

Enter an old URL, and hit 'Submit' - You should then be taken to a results page, and hopefully will see this:

"HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently => "

If you don't, something is wrong

Try that tool, and copy/paste the result here for everyone to take a peek at - we will then help if we can, as we will have more to go on

Hope that helps!

Oh, and also, consider this plugin for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-http-headers/

I like to add the 301's myself in the .htaccess file, with the following format:

Redirect 301 /url-goes-here.html http://www.yoursite.com/url-goes-here.html

Be sure to use that structure (eg. NO http://www. on the old page, but have it on the new page)

Maybe try that for 1 URL, and see if it works for you? - I have to say, be sure to not delete any o fthe other stuff in your .htaccess file! - Best to create a backup BEFORE editing

Remember, when doing web design, coding, or on-page SEO, if anything goes wrong, the worse thing that should happen is that you have to revert back to the bacup that you made before you started

Although if you have lots to do, then you can automate it... various ways to do that!

Really it depends on the context of what you want to do.

Can I ask, how many pages do you want to 301 redirect?

Hi, I am not Gianluca, but hope you don't mind my input here!

From our own experience, this is what happens:

1) Implement a 301

2. TEST to ensure you get the correct header status (301 permanently moved)

3. Google eventually crawls the old page, and finds the 301 redirect

4. After some time, Google replaces the old URL with the new URL.

Now, as for speeding things up, in my opinion (born out by testing), counter to your idea of adding the new URL to webmaster tools, it is better to get Google to find the actual 301 redirect, before the new url (this way, Google won't see the new URL as a duplicate, before it finds the old, now 301 redirected, URL, which in theory 'could' happen if both pages had the same content/title tag, etc - Although with just 1 or 2 redirects, it is quite unlikely, and should resolve itself pretty quick).

So what I like to do, is try to get Googlebot to the old (301'd) page as soon as possible once it has been implemented (and tested!).

To do this, consider pinging the URL, or pinging your RSS feed (if your site has them)  - Tweet about the fact you did a redirect, and link from twitter to the old URL, or even, if you have done some website redesign, write a press release about it, and within the PR, link to the old page... Basically, anything to get google old Googlebot to crawl the old URL< and find the 301 redirect

Others may disagree, but this does appear to work well for us!

Hope that helps,

Mike.

In addition to the excellent response by Robert Fisher, below, you do not actually NEED to do this, but you CAN do it automatically if you choose to.

Google News needs...

EITHER a unique 3 digit code in the URL...

OR

A Google news specific sitemap.

So, your options are to either change your WP (I checked, your site is Wordpress based, yes?) Permalinks settings, to include post id, OR use a google news sitemap plugin.

You can always put a number in front of the post id, so use something like:

/%postname%/1%post_id%

So, adding a numerical '1' befor %post_id% in your permalinks.

If you are worried about lots of 404 errors due to changing your URL structure, then how about using deans permalinks migration (install it BEFORE changing your permalink settings!) - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalinks-migration-plugin-for-wordpress/

As for a Google News sitemap... For wordpress, I recommend this one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gn-xml-sitemap/

If you go down the sitemap route, do be sure that ONLY news posts are included... E.G. NOT your static, non-news content pages!

IN TERMS OF SEO -

I don't feel it will effect things too much, so long as everything else is good as regards your on-page SEO etc.

Hope that helps!

Personally, if you're 100% that you don't want the Wordpress install, I'd:

• Delete all files in the myblog subfolder, except the .htaccess file
• Edit the .htaccess file (or create a new one if you deleted it)
• 301 Redirect any good posts (had rankings, traffic or links) to a specific, related page on your main site
• Add a redirect rule to 301 all remaining pages to / (main site's homepage)

This may sound odd, but I'd then submit a sitemap with the pages that caused the 500 and 404 errors, aiming to get Google to recrawl the error pages & find the new 301 rules.

If you need a hand with this, I'm busy today but I can make the .htaccess entry for you tomorrow morning *UK time) and ping over to you.

EDIT: I'll be out for the next few hrs, but will keep an eye for a response when I can. If you want to drop me an email, check my Moz profile page, look under 'Mike Gracia's Blog:' and email me at that domain (my email is mike@).

Just to say I'll be sorting the htaccess for you later this afternoon

I'll ping you a private message on Moz when done and will include my contact details in case you need a hand or run into any problems.

Tricky one to answer without knowing more details really to be honest, but here's some things to consider:

• Do you have many backlinks from decent, Spanish websites? If not, I'd have a think about how to get some (don't go for low quality of course!).
• You say you're not a bricks & mortar business, but do you have a Spanish address & phone at all? If so, do you have any citations? Are there (again, decent/quality) sites you can get the site listed on?
• How's your international SEO set-up? For example, geographical targeting in Search Console for the domain or subfolder/subdomain (/es set to Spain, unless Spain is the default, in which case Spain set as the target for the entire domain), hreflang settings...
• How well is your Spanish SERP snippet (title & description) optimised for CTR? Can you make any changes (without negatively affecting SEO) to increase your click through rate from the search results? (Think good, enticing wording in your < title > tag, a decent meta description that pulls-in folk's interest).

Just a few thoughts