Thanks everyone - some very useful feedback here and certainly food for thought.

We've got some locality-centric data we can draw on so we should be able to get some unique content for each area together. There are also some links pointing to the home page from businesses located in certain cities/towns - could changing these links to the relevant local landing pages negatively effect our national rankings?

John

Hi all,

When it comes to local SEO in 2015, I appreciate that having a physical location in the town/city you wish to rank is a major factor. However, if you're a national brand is it still possible to rank for local searches when you're based in one location?

The reason I ask is that, although our service is national, the nature of what we offer means that it is not inconceivable that people would search for a local variation of our top keywords. Other than the standard things - location in the content, the H1/H2s, title tag, meta description, url etc. - is there anything national businesses can do to help?

Thanks in advance.

John

Thanks Massimiliano. That particular domain still has a DA of 43 so perhaps they haven't quite got around to it yet..

Appreciate the response.

Hi Massimiliano,

No, the competitor has replaced all of the old content with new content that is targeted towards their keywords. The website in question is this one:

http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/

It used to be a website dedicated to The Hutton Inquiry (funnily enough...) but is now just a generic blog called 'Personal Injury UK'. In total they've done this with 5 different expired domains, in the exact same way.

Is this just one of those things that Google claim - and may even usually - they'd discount but that might actually just slip through the net? The rest of their backlink profile is very poor and their rise through the rankings seems completely inexplicable.

John

Hi guys,

We've recently noticed a (very) minor competitor competing with us, as well as some of our industry's biggest names, in the Google SERPs - and the reason why has us absolutely stumped.

Aside from an awful website from an aesthetic/UX point of view, their on-site content is horribly over-optimised, with keywords on the homepage even STRONG TAGGED for crying out loud! A backlink check using OSE and Ahrefs found 19 linking domains - most of which were just trash - but there were 5 that boasted some decent DA, the highest being 43.

The thing is, these 5 sites are all very generic industry-relevant "blogs" that provide exceptionally poor quality content. The thing is, they have some very high quality backlinks (the BBC, the Guardian and CNN to name just three) acquired when the websites were something different entirely. The competitor has basically bought expired domains, turned them into basic websites related to our industry and linked them to their main domain.

My question then is: is this competitor benefiting from the very high quality links that are pointing at sites that are then linked to their main domain? I found an article from 2009 that suggested old links stop counting after being purchased by someone else, but we are stumped as to why they could be otherwise.

Thanks in advance everyone!

John