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I dont think it will be yes for over optimization but it does tell you if you are in to keyword spamming within the page!

Have played around a bit with this feature and in my experience Google and Yahoo and most reputable local websites consider this as same... infect if you try adding different format they will convert it in to the one format that they accept.

There are (may be) some websites that do not care of it and find different numbers as separate but most local websites that contain value in terms of conversions and rankings in the local world can sense this and find this as 1 telephone number.

If I would be at your place I would have started interacting on twitter and email and would have tried to go a little personal and discuss stuff and ideas around the targeted piece of content... during the communication I would have directly or indirectly encouraged him to write a detailed post about him so that their users can get more knowledge about it!

My personal advice would be to take your engagement on the next level!

In my experience SEOmoz team have the best customer service and they do reply quickly with humbleness. Well obviously sometimes things can go wrong but i guess if you try again and mention your complete problem in detail, I am sure roger will look in to it and will try to help you fixing your problem as quickly as possible.

That would be wrong if I say no! Let me define your situation again with some possible solutions to get rid of the Google kill zone.

You have lots of sites and your want to redirect all of them to the main site. Ask yourself an important question, the redirect is for passing the link juice to the main website or to redirect user to the new area?

If it is for users, I would recommend 302 redirections (atleast at the beginning if not all then few that contain low quality links and more.). If it is for passing the link juice, I would advice to sort few websites that have the highest quality of links and redirect those only (2 to 4 sites).

Redirecting all the website atonce to the main website will alert Google and Although you wil be doing this for traffic and links but still Google will find it suspicious as this is what spammers normally do in order to game search engines.

Hope this helps!

You nailed it sir!

One can have a different opinion from me so I am advising you something I would do if I would be at your place.

I would list down all the keywords I want to target on the website and divide them in to 2 parts Primary keywords and Secondary keywords keeping their importance ad competition in mind. I will then target the secondary keywords to sub pages and try to target primary keywords on the home page.

Also, I will create sub pages for exact match keyword (for primary keywords) to give support to the home page!

• Other than just Google+ local there are tons of yellow pages and data aggregation website that allow business to list their business and move from their accordingly... some of the other websites other them Google+local, Yahoo local and Bing local are yell.com, yelp.com, yp.com, truelocal.com and many more...

• Some websites will only allow you to go live once they will verify your business through phone in that case the call will be received on your customer’s business address and upon verification it will give you a code that you can enter to verify your listing. I usually define the process to my client before going on with the process so he knew what is going to happen.

• For most of the website you can use one account but obviously with yahoo and bing you will be needing their own email accounts.

• Here is the top 50 list of local citation for US and UK (http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938) if you have a business in Australia then this is the dedicated list of business in AU (http://www.setalks.com/ultimate-list-of-local-citations-for-australian-businesses/)

• You have to talk to business owner and explain the situation and why it is needed for their business before you actually step ahead and start submitting your businesses to local citations.

• Few need a different accounts as mentioned above but mostly it works with a single account

• Brightlocal, Getlisted there can be few more!

  I hope I cover all the answers let me know if there is any new information you want!

I use xml-sitemaps.com for sitemap generation as its simple and easy to use!

If you are adding sitemap link in your robots.txt file its fine but not adding is not really a big problem!

Pretty much agree with Chris’s answer on this one!

Press Releases still works but I believe with the period of time the SEO value of Press Release will go down so it is a good idea to use it naturally but do not specifically add it in your SEO strategy for link grabbing.

If you have any news that you really want people to know, there is no problem in going with PRs (if using links try sing naked links or brand name as an anchor text) but do not use it just because you need a link with your desired anchor text on it!

Just check two things, if you have included Meta description in your Yoast plugin for home page. If it will be missing, Google usually take any line from the content.

The idea is to recheck if the Meta description is available and wait for the next crawl and Google will update your given Meta description.

Hope this helps!

If you have change the domain, the only thing you can do is to 301 redirects the old domain to the new one and start promoting it and getting quality links on it. There will be a drop in traffic and rankings but it will be for a short span of time and it will come back again.

Don’t revert to old again because it will not do much help as far as the rakings and traffic is concern, my idea is to create campaigns that actually work for you.

Hope this helps!!

Martin as far as the categories are concern its always up to you but you should always keep the structure clean so that visitor can easily access to every category page without any problem and so as Google bot.

With URLs, it is always great to keep it short and easy to understand. In my opinion you should have to have a complete product name for product pages... that will look something like this...

http://www.domain.com/name-of-product

For categories, as you said you have 50 categories so if it is possible for you to divide in to like 5 major categories and then each major category contain 10 sub categories.... (if it is possible) this way the infra structure will be clean and easy for users as well as for Google bot to crawl all the pages of the website.

Hope this helps!

I agree with Matt, there is no penalty I know that has to do anything with penalty but if you run screaming frog crawler it will ask you to limit the size of the image to 100KB but again going above is not really a penalty.

Yes if the images will be heavy the time on site will increase and if the page take more than usual to load this is where you might lose your rankings as site load time is a ranking signal now.

Hope this helps!

my best advice for you is to go through Moz's Beginners guide to SEO and ask questions in QnA if you didn't understand anything and you will get the basics of everything and then you can move ahead step by step.

Hope this helps!

Ok, you are kind of misleading Google by this... canonical tag tells Google that where the original content is located. According to your signal it is location on your https version which is redirected back to http so in other words your original content is located to a destination which is relocated to some other URL....

All you have to do is to remove just an s from the canonical version and all will be fine!

This happens sometime that your keyword started to get stuffed as you are using that same keyword again and again on the same page. Actually tool is there to tell you that the amount of that particular keyword is more than normal on the page.

When it comes to keyword stuffing, I always believe that its not about how many times you are using one keyword on the page but its more about if the content on the website looks original and helpful to the audience?

In-case you think that the overall feel of the content looks stuffed then you probably should consider changing it but if not then you should carry on with that.

Hope this helps!

My answer is totally based on my experience and the information you have provided so far. I believe that your website is not under any manual penalty but still due to the low quality of links you have built over the period of time; it is now affecting your rankings.

How to get out of it?

The best way to start is by auditing your links, get all the links from Open Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tool and if you can invest then get the link profile of your website from Majestic SEO as they have the largest index of links among all.

Audit the link profit and separate the bad links (you can use software like Link Detox and Link Risk here) from the profile and try to remove as many bad links from the link profile as possible and create a disavow file for the rest.

Upload the Disavow file in Google Webmaster tool and you are half done!

This way you have told Google that you don’t want a link juice from the list of links that you have updated in the disavow file.

The step two is to create regular and kick ass content on the website and get quality links back to the website. After submitting the disavow file your core job is to create quality content and get high quality links naturally that points back to the website.

Hope this helps!

If I would be at your place I would see the link profile of the staff domain and see if there are any valuable links on that domain? In-case of yes I would prefer to redirect instead of turning down the domain.

On the other hand if the staff domain’s link profile is spamy and risky then I would prefer to go with the other option and that is to turn down the domain at the first place.

Hope this helps!

The two round interview idea is great but in my personal opinion, it will work better for an agency. I have worked for years in different In-house companies and from the experience, I am telling you that success of in-house is depends upon multiple factors.

If you are hiring a single person to handle your complete SEO, than you are looking for a guy who can understand the ins and out of your business, can write about it, do competitor analysis, outreach, build links and build reports and present it to the CEO.

Unlike agency where they have a set culture relevant for SEO and digital marketing, In-house culture is more business orientated where the guy will be sitting around non-SEO people.

What I mean to say here is that when you search for in-house guy you should look for a person who know their game well plus they understand your business and have management skills unlike agency where all they need is a good writer and they give them on-the-job training.

Just a thought!

If this not really a manual penalty then disavow will take a long time and seeing the rankings nad traffic back will take months. The reason I will suggest not to 301 to the sub category of the main site is because if it was really under the red light, it will hurt the main site as well instead of helping it.

What you ideally should do is to make sure you disavow all the bad links, now create some high quality links to different part so the website and see if this help you with rankings and traffic. One you see the rankings and traffic is recovered, then if you want 301 is a safe bet.

Hope this helps!

+1 for Mobil and Video Marketing related topics!

I think it’s pretty much depends upon situation to situation. In my case if you are donating something, in partners with some organization or another other type that falls in this area, you can have a do-follow link that point back to your website.

I prefer to use brand names as an alt image but if you are using other words that make sense, I personally don’t think there should be a problem.

Note: Overdoing anything will hurt!

I wrote a detailed post on SEMRush that talks about step by step research in order to come up with the list of keywords that are money making or help you get quality traffic and leads from search engine.

http://www.semrush.com/blog/publications/judge-value-keywords-business/

Go through the post and you will have a better idea. SEMRUsh does have limited countries but I think Google Keyword planner can help better in this regards.

Hope this helps!

I think I have to agree about most of the things that Patrick discussed already but make sure that visitors are considering at one that can easily be done by having a similar design, cross promotion, easy access from blog to website and from website to blog and more.

Also, it is advisable to do a small awareness campaign that give a clear idea to user that these two different domains are owned by one.

Three quick things you should do and I am sure the indexing ratio will go high!

1. Index your website to Google Webmaster tool. If you are already there submit your xml sitemap to GWT and make sure it’s approved from there.
2. Make sure the internal linking is done correctly. Don’t overdo it but atleast to some extent so that bots can move to other relevant pages on the website.
3. The URLs are not indexing consider pushing them via social (twitter tweets would be ideal)

Bonus: If you can get quality links back to those pages that are not indexed would be mindblowing as this way the indexing will guaranteed.

Also check your robots.txt file to make sure no URL is blocked from Google index.

Hope this helps!

Alan, If you are looking for some tool that can check your bad links than, link detox seems to be the best option around but as you said that your link profile isn’t long to doing it manually isn’t really a bad option either.

While back I wrote a post about how to find bad links in your link profile. In that post I discuss the anatomy of a bad links so just keep that in mind while sorting bad links from the good one and you are good to go for creating a disavow file.

Remember DA does not count the quality of domains so expecting a jump in DA because you are increasing the number of quality domains is not ideal.

Hope this helps!

Completely agree to Thomas! Including keyword Meta tag in the page will never really help you with SEO or any kind of rankings but on the other hand it will exactly tell your competitors what you are focusing on each page of the website.

This might help them align their strategies against you and kick you out from the better SERP positions in search engine from the targeted key phrases.

Hope this helps!

Alan, if I would be at your place, I would have moved to a program like link detox instead of the manual labor and here are some reasons why!

1. You are emailing to the real people so no matter what trick you use, there are chances that you may fail, especially if they have decided not to remove the links.
2. The removal ratio can dramatically increase if you offer a small amount to remove a link but again disavow is a better and easy option that will help you save your time and money.
3. Manual Labor to do a work that might or might not work is a bad investment in my opinion, on the other hand manual labor will be much more expensive as compare to a tool like Link Detox.

Link Detox will find bad links, email them and give you the list of bad links that contain your website link. You can get that data and create a disavow file and submit it to Google.

All in all, I understand your point but in my opinion it is not a very good investment.

Hope this helps!

In my opinion, there should be no problem with you publish multiple articles on the same date but technically it is impossible to do justice to all the content pieces when published on the same date. If I would be at your place, I prefer to go with the calendar. I would prefer to create the calendar based on the team members I have.

If I will have two to three members in my outreaching and content promotion team, I would prefer not to publish more than two articles per day.

Once the content piece will be launched I will ask my team members to start the promotion activities which include outreach to like-minded people, social bookmarking, link outreach and more.

This will also depends upon the website popularity, if you have a website like Search Engine Journal where people do expect more than 2 to 3 articles a day I will go ahead and follow the trend but if not then I will start a slow and move accordingly based on how much traffic I am receiving on each content piece.

The best idea is to see how popular you are within the community, what your readers are expecting and act accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Saying that these domains are more or less useless will be wrong in my opinion. If I would be at your place I would have gone for the micro sites idea with creative content that can help the people of that particular city or the people who want to travel to that city.

If you are up for it, make sure that the content do not get duplicated. I agree that some of the gallery pictures might be the same but your creativity in text content should make it as unique and powerful for readers as possible.

What you should not do is a massive redirect as this will not help you in any way but too many redirections might cause a negative fluctuations in rankings.

Hope this helps!

Honestly, if you don’t want to lose your current traffic shift it to new domain, I am not saying it’s not possible but you will see a dip (maybe temporary) but there will be a dip until Google figure out the new website, index their pages, recognize the link juice pass from old domain to a new domain.

I believe if you are doing PR and PPC to let people know about the new brand, in that case Google will soon figure out that the old brand has been shifted to new brand and allow the new brand to appear in search results when someone search for old brand name.

Again, what activities you have mentioned are great but there will be a dip so you have to take in to consideration and act accordingly.

Hope this helps!

In my opinion, quality content has nothing to do with keyword density in it. If the content is quality, users will stick on the page and you will get more time on site by users and shares on social media accordingly.

As far as the rankings are concern, I know it’s important but keyword density is not the only thing that Google took in to consideration when ranking a website. My advice is to do the deeper analysis of the website and see why the rankings have dropped?

-          Is it because the content that dropped its ranking were really bad?

-          Is your bounce rate high on those pages?

-          How many shares and link you get on pages that are ranking well as compare to the pages that dropped recently

-          How powerful is your internal linking

Also, create few more content and see how they are acting after the update, and make a decision based on the data you have collected.

My advice is to keep your users as your first priority because if they like it, they will share it and the conversion rate (important at the end of the day) will improve.

Hope this helps!

Talking from the experience e-commerce for a big website is one hell of a deal and if it’s a competitive market you need to deal with lots of stuff. You have to deal with everything from Meta details to UI, UX, schema and more.

http://www.inc.com/jayson-demers/17-essential-seo-strategies-for-e-commerce-sites.html

This post covers the initial game plan but there is always more to it.

Hope this helps!

Daniel, I guess there is no straight answer to it and I totally agree with you when it comes to SEO audits, now it’s not limited to titles and meta tags only. One has to focus on UX and UI of the website, their bounce rate on the website, content creation, blog and much more.

If you personally ask me I love Alan Bleiweiss when it comes to SEO audits of the website and I highly recommend you checking this post out http://alanbleiweiss.com/professional-seo-audits/seo-audit-checklist/

It covers all the important points that one should cover when auditing the website.

Hope this helps!

Let me be straight here!

Website with 20 quality pages as compare to a website with 200 shitty pages, Google will consider 20 pages website as more legitimate and will rank it higher accordingly as compare to the website that contain more pages...

Search Engines are getting smarter day by day so any software that suggest you to trick SE is not appropriate and you should not go for that!

Hope this helps!

Not sure what exactly is a satisfactory answer to him but as far as results in Google.com they are not always as per the guidelines. Type in “SEO Services” and you will find companies who are ranking on basis of blog comment spam.

But they are much better than what I use to see previous year!

I think Google is working hard to make their SERP results pure but they are 100% pure and as per the guidelines is not something I will agree with.

It’s a process and it will take time #iguess

Ok, in my previous experience for many websites under different niches, pages that does not contain commercial content tend to contain more links then service pages and for some obvious reasons you can get most results on the home page.

I believe at the end of the day you need this website to produce leads no matter if home page ranked or inner pages (correct me if I am wrong!)

To start I would say your current strategy of creating separate page is fine but here are the following things that I see missing on your website.

1. More content should be needed on the targeted pages
2. Images should be light and properly optimized
3. Be careful about over optimization
4. Leads form is missing on the targeted service pages
5. Non-Commercial pages do not exist... I believe having a blog is necessary for grabbing quality links as well as converting potential clients!

Hope this helps!

I will use the basics here!

You have 2 website, website "A" is a total SPAM and website "B" is decent and showing some positive moments.

When you shut down your first website, make sure all of its content is out of the Google index and all the links are now linking to either 404 page or some other pages other than the content itself.

Also, make sure that the content is not used elsewhere.

If this is done, you can reuse the content slowly on your B website and run stuff accordingly and I am sure there shouldn’t be any problem with that!

Personal Opinion, my idea is to build the newer version of the content (may be by adding more facts, data and figures to it) and reuse it on the website so that it not only pleases search engine but the real audience accordingly.

Just a thought!

More relevant copy? What I said is add more content on the service pages which simply means that current content on the page is too short to convert! Try to add more engaging and encouraging content for the targeted audience to convert.

If there is a possibility of reducing the total number f images per page... then go ahead and do that but there is no hard and fast rule for it! But more importantly add image alt names so that images can be indexed and ranked by Google engine accordingly!

Addition of keywords on the website copy is fine but adding too many times can hurt your SEO and also known as over optimization.

I believe for businesses like this quick leads form usually work... you can give it a try to see if lead ratio gets improved!

Yes, I am advising you to start a blog... social media is one thing but blog actually helps you get rankings for long tail key phrases and at the same time engaging and educational content on the blog will help targeted audience to convert.

hope this helps!

Hello David,

In my experience, Meta keywords have no negative impact on rankings and neither positive. I certainly agree with EGOL that if you are smart, title tags are good for you understand what the page is targeting any ways…

I personally don’t think there is something they know and we don’t but yeah as you said they are banks, they care less about what other people extract from their data as they are number one (or they easily can outrank their competitors) because of huge budgets and talented big teams.

They may be using wrong keywords in their Meta keywords to misguide people who believe too much on meta keywords of competitors. (possibilities)

I think in the world of today, using or not using Meta keyword has no huge benefits… just a thought!

Hope this helps!

Although I do agree with Google but talking form the personal experience unless you are a BIG brand sitewide links are going to kill you no matter how valid they are on your website and visitors...

Try to avoid as many sitewide links as possible!

Mate nailed it completely!

In my personal opinion redirecting keyword rich domain to the main domain is not a bad idea but if you are going to flood it on home page and all the targeted pages then you will be in the sure trouble because Google does not like the idea of using this for ranking boost!

This might end up getting a penalty from Google!

I agree with Russ! If you have a 404 page see if you have exact page on your new website (or atleast nearer to exact) if yes, redirect! If you are in to ecommerce industry and you really don’t think that 404 page have any other alternate, in that case try redirecting it to 404 pages!

Make sure the page is customized, provide value to users and allow them to continue their journey on the website.

Hope this helps!

In my opinion, it is a good idea to get expert opinion about your site. There are many reputable professionals within in the Moz community that can do this job for you!

Marie Haynes is indeed expert in this area; there are others available like Alan Beliweiss who is famous for his expert level site audits.

While back I wrote a post on my blog that discuss about how to find the quality SEO consultant http://www.setalks.com/how-to-find-quality-seo-consultant-for-my-business/ no matter who you choose you see if he/she is the best fit for you!

Prabhu, based on the information you have provided I would say going with subdomains are going to hurt you. Because you are displaying the same content on two different URLs and the only change is a currency.

No matter if you are attacked by Panda, I will still go with the idea suggested by Oleg.

Hope this helps!

Ideally just by changing the title tags the index should not be dropped but if this is something you have noticed, you can always update your sitemap.xml and resubmit it to Google and in the next crawl it should be indexed again.

Hope this helps!