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Good day!

I don't think adding the canonical to your hyperlinks is going to accomplish what you want.  All of the direction Google gives is to add it as a in the of your page ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en & http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions ).

From a technical web development perspective, when a rel attribute is present on a hyperlink, it "...describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute..." ( http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-rel ).  That being the case, a canonical would only make sense in this relationship where the link actually appears on the canonical versions.

Hope that helps!

Greetings Samantha,

Combining all your sites into one has several advantages, for example-

• Cutting maintenance, programming and upkeep costs
• Allowing all new trust to flow to one site instead of X sites
• Giving your local dealership pages the trust strength of the main domain
• Brand cohesiveness

Having a main group site with individual locality pages within it is definitely doable from a local ranking perspective.  We have a franchise client who has over 50 brick and mortar locations in 3 states and we are able to rank them locally with the same amount of effort you would put into a separate site (from an SEO perspective).  You'll want to make sure, at a minimum, you do the following-

1. Each dealership has it's own locality page on your site
2. The address, phone number, etc. on your locality page exactly matches the same in your Google Places pages
3. Link your local Google Places pages to the matching locality page on your website.
4. Though not required, I would recommend 301ing your locality websites home, about, contact, etc. to their corresponding locality page (inventory can be 301d to it's appropriate page)

As for a recommendation, I would say do what fits best for you.  It seems from what you're saying there are some financial benefits to merging and there are no SEO hurdles to prevent you from doing so.  Good luck!

Hi Philip,

You definitely want to look into Custom Post Types.  By creating a new Custom Post Type, it can allow you to create another set of content in the same manner as "Posts" (non-archived) or "Pages" (archived & hierarchical) you can then use to separate your content into buckets like you mention.  For some folks we will create very specific custom post types like "Products" that feature items for sale.  You can also create custom fields that apply to just those post types that can then be used to add additional meta data to the custom post.

Two plugins we use for this are-

• Types - https://wordpress.org/plugins/types/
• Advanced Custom Fields - http://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/

Obviously there are others but that should get you started.  I'm happy to reply to any other questions you may have, just leave a comment.  Good luck!

Hello!

I wouldn't consider it to be very serious, however if you wanted to nip it in the bud, the best way would be to block /Account/* in your robots.txt and also add a meta noindex to all of your /Account pages.

The robots.txt directive asks compliant bots to not crawl the page(s) while the noindex requests search engines to not index those pages.

If the content is irrelevant I wouldn't redirect it to specific pages on your site.  If it is generally still relevant to the business as a whole, you could 301 redirect it to the root URL.  If not, at the very least, if some referring visitors might become customers, you could change your 404 page to offer up calls to action or shopping options for the folks who see it.

My 2 cents.  

I wouldn't worry thought about removing the links unless they're very poor quality and their percentage is high compared to your "good" links.

It should work with posts, pages, custom post types, etc without needing that plugin.

Good luck!

I'll give you my opinion but it isn't a definitive answer.

I believe what you're seeing is a Google SERP test and they are pulling that from the content on the manufacturer's page but I agree there is no rich markup on the page like Schema to point Google to use it.

A quick search of lacrosse monkey shows me no Google ads on the page which is a pretty sure signal Google recognizes this manufacturer as a brand entity.  That in and of itself would suggest Google might also understand the products as entities and be pulling content from the product page and testing it in the Knowledgegraph to see how searchers interact with it.

Unfortunately I don't think there's much you can do about it.

1. I would argue there are (as you might expect) pros and cons for both approaches.  For example-

• By having "Dr. Who, DDS" and "Whoville Dentistry" as separate entities and creating citations for both, you easily address users who might search for them in both ways.  For example, I never can remember the name of my Dentist's office, but I do know his name and that's how I search for him.  Same sometimes for other services where you associate with the provider much more than the name of the business.
• One con of the above example, is you now have two (or way more, thinking real estate) separate entities to maintain and twice the work in building citations to them.

2. If it were me I would go with direct line or extension and make sure all citations were formatted exactly the same and reserve the main, primary number for the business entity.

3. It depends on if this is a single-location brick and mortar or one of many branches.  If a single location, go for the home page.  If multiple locations, to the profile page of that location on the main website.  Same for the individual person entity, it should go to their personal profile page on the website.

So those are some thoughts of mine.

You're most welcome, glad you found it useful!

Is your .htaccess file writeable by the server?  If not your permalink (and plugin) settings won't work.

Yes you are 100% right in my opinion.  The whole reason I believe for the shift in brand preference is a play on generating more ad spend via Adwords.  The search results are so unhelpful for so many searches nowadays.

For example, search for "Trademark Registration" on Google.  That SERP used to be full of attorneys and websites offering that service.  Now it's mostly government websites forcing the attorneys to buy ads for this highly searched term.

Ah I love Raven.  But which part in particular?  Is it being pulled in from your Analytics?  Can you share a screenshot of what you're looking at?

Hi Nick,

Unfortunately at this time there isn't a way to specify a shorter meta description.  The only way to achieve what you're looking for would be to shorten all meta descriptions for sub-pages but that means you'd lose a lot of real estate if it showed up in a normal SERP.

I don't host my WordPress sites on IIS but according to their site, you have three choices for custom permalinks on IIS-

Microsoft IIS 7+ web server with the URL Rewrite 1.1+ module and PHP 5 running as FastCGI
Microsoft IIS 6+ using ASAPI_Rewrite (free for single-site server, $$ for multi-site server)
Microsoft IIS 6+ using Ionic ISAPI Rewriting Filter (IIRF) (free for single-site or multi-site server)

I got the above from this page.

Greetings James!  Welcome to the fun-filled and often onerous world of SEO.

Just taking a quick look at your site, you seem to have a lot of content pages, etc. but very little in the way of trust flowing to your site.  For example, I can see you have thousands of backlinks but they're only spread out over forty or so unique domains.

As real estate is often local, you'd do well to try and rank in the local pack results for real estate related searches, however I notice a Google+ page that looks like your's but it doesn't have the same address as your website.  You want that to match up and then also start building credibility to your Google+ page through positive reviews, etc. from users.

Real estate is a super-competitive niche and your best bet  is to (at least until you have more trust) target more of the long tail of search.  Those are just a few tips to get you started but anytime you're doing a competitive niche in a big city / region, it's not going to be a quick and easy task.  Keep at it though; you'll get there!

I would suggest removing it as that page sends several signals that could be interpreted as negative by Google, et al-

• http://5startemplates.com/link-exchange.html - having a page that endorses link exchanges on a site is most likely a strong signal that you don't want
• The links on the URL you show are not closely related to each other semantically and have nothing to do with the business of the website which is another signal that you probably don't want
• A quick check of the source domain's link neighborhood doesn't reveal too much juice flowing in from trusted sources
• And finally the content around the links and the business of this website likely don't relate much to your client's content which again is another signal that could be interpreted negatively.

All of the above independently are not probably a deciding factor, but if you combine them all it paints a picture that isn't positive for your client.

DMOZ wait times are typically measured in months and/or years, if you ever hear anything.  Don't stress about it; move on and cross your fingers!

Greetings!  I think you're going to be better off creating an evergreen page that you can build trust to over time.

Because blog posts are off time-stamped Google may tend to ignore it as it gets stale.  The exception would be if you were to, as Jimmy is suggesting, create a category page or something similar with unique content AND an aggregation of recent blog posts in that category.  But you'd need both to keep it ranked over time.

I checked Moz's Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs which are both good sources of backlink data.

Structured data is a nice thing to have but wouldn't necessarily hurt your ranking.  It can help Google more easily make sense of your content and also help you stand out a bit more in the SERPs if Google chooses to show a rich snippet result for you.

Getting rid of bad backlinks can be a manual task of reaching out and contacting webmasters and there are some tools that can make that process a little less time consuming.  However, I didn't review your links for quality, just noting there were a lot of links from a small number of domains.  The top one looked like the personal site of the company owner or broker.

Greetings Pamela!

This is nothing to worry about at all.  UTF-8 is simply a type of character encoding and is set in the websites to instruct web browsers on how to interpret the character encoding.  See- http://screencast.com/t/s4I2RNsgqUh

As it's not negative and perfectly normal, there's no need to change it at all.

Just a quick note, adding it to robots.txt instructs the crawlers not to crawl the URL, but it can still be indexed if it is being linked to from other places (and probably is if Moz crawler is finding it).

The easiest way to solve the problem if you don't want them indexed is to edit your search results page template and add a meta noindex to the .

I personally don't like to see search results surfaced to search engines (unless there's a strategic reason for doing so).

Greetings Oren,

Good question.  We use this tactic a lot with clients and on our own website but we don't necessarily include it on every page or post in an attempt to reduce blindness to the form.  We do it quite often though.  The key is to make sure you don't just thrown the form in there but actually call the reader to action in some way.  ie: "For more information on (what the post topic is about), sign up for our monthly newsletter below:"

If definitely improves conversion rate (although I don't have any specific numbers for you) and with the right hook in the call to action is very effective in lead generation, and also classifying your leads into buckets of interest for different types of email campaigns (or whatever).

Hello!

Is it just you have both www and non-www versions of all pages that are resolving?  If so you can add one 301 redirect rule in IIS to redirect all of them from one to the other and solve the problem.  If not, feel free to provide more detail and I or someone else can chime in.

EDIT
I just took a quick look and it looks like that's part of the problem. Follow the above and it should take care of it.  I also noted the non-SSL version is 302 redirecting to the SSL version.  That is an incorrect implementation.  You want that to be a 301 so if someone links to the non-SSL version you get credit for that link juice.

Cheers!

If you're looking to redirect ALL sub-pages to the new main page then you would use mod_rewrite with your .htaccess file something like-

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/dental-tips(.*)$ http://floridadentist.com/dental-tips/

If you're trying to redirect to the matching URI just under that new sub-directory this would be more appropriate-

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/dental-tips(.*)$ http://floridadentist.com/dental-tips/$1

Good day doctorSIM!

Actually there was a really great post up on Moz last month about this very thing- http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Enjoy!

The file name isn't as important for SEO as it used to be.  It can provide a useful signal as to the nature of the image's content and the text content around it.  It shouldn't cause any "issues" or penalties with your SEO, however, you may lose the side benefit of some/all traffic from image searches.

The biggest concern I would have is if the manufacturer decided to move, delete or rename images.

I like #5 for the reasons you've stated.  Also keywords in the URI string aren't as strong a ranking factor (in my opinion) as they used to be.  My 2 cents.

I think it is possible to add 1000s of pages of unique content over time.  

Excluding (I assume that's what you mean) the layered nav pages in robots.txt won't necessarily keep Google from indexing those pages, only crawling them.  So you end up with something like this in the SERP - http://screencast.com/t/SPKDV09SM9 (Note the meta description.)

If you didn't want them in the SERP you'd need to add a meta noindex to the of the page as well.

I don't really like splash/doorway/gateway pages like those from a usability perspective.  If I'm going to drive traffic to a page on my client's e-commerce site, I want that page to have active product on it.  I realize you can do some Magento hoodoo and get product on static pages but it's not worth the effort in my opinion.  You're better off focusing on conversions from your layered nav pages with unique content.

Hello!  Great question; I've worked with Magento quite a bit and layered navigation can definitely be a bit tricky from an SEO perspective.

The most important thing to opening up some or all of these pages to Google for consideration, is having unique content on the page.  This is not something Magento themes typically include by default but will be 100% necessary to get most if not all of these pages to rank well.

Most typically we add a static block to the top or bottom of the page to add uniqueness.  Without it, all of the content on these types of pages are almost always 100% non-unique and from my experience Google ignores.

If your layered nav pages also use pagination, you'll need to make sure you follow best practices for using canonical and/or rel prev/next/view all to make sure Google isn't looking at your paginated pages as extra duplicated content.

And as a final reply, I think it can be a great idea with limited consequences as long as you follow the above advice regarding unique content and pagination.  Additionally there's no worry regarding Pagerank or destroying the world.  

I personally prefer the slash but it doesn't make any difference as long as you're consistent and if as you say Google is already indexing most without, I'd probably go that way too!

If you are using rel canonical then you can have the same on each page and it should be okay.

Otherwise, I would make sure your paginated pages don't have it.  The next/prev helps Google to understand these are subsequent pages of the original category but it doesn't really give instruction as to the preferred page, etc. (like the canonical would) so you could end up with Google ignoring the content after it sees it too many times.