Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Geraldine

A client of ours used http://www.regus.fr/ to set up an address in Paris for this purpose and later opened a real office - and a real French company - when sales increased. Regus have offices worldwide see http://www.regus.fr/country-selector.aspx so I imagine that they can help for all countries.

I'll add to Gianluca's comments that Google won't be "fooled" by this address into recognising you as a French company. Google checks this through access to company registration databases rather than its own My Business listings.

But there are plenty of other advantages in having a My Business listing and Paris would be a good base in France for your site (audience reach). For an e-commerce site, potential clients will be reassured by a local telephone number too.

Looking at the French site, I noticed that the HREFLANG is incorrectly implemented. This is more important than the postal address. I strongly suggest you correct that

• Neil

Hi

A year after you asked the question may be too late but I run a French SEO consultancy company in France and we can help with a lot of projects. I'm also well connected in the French SEO community so if you need something very specific I'm sure I can point you in the right direction.

Contact me on neil@goodness.fr if you still need help

Regards

• Neil

I've been trying to help a local chapter of a non-profit organisation set up a Facebook page (for free!) but the idea has been refused at the national level. I think from a lack of understanding of what good Facebook can do for their communication because even the page created for the whole NPO is very low on fans and hardly ever updated.

I've got plenty of examples of NGOs doing well on Facebook.

But what I'd love to find an example of an NGOs doing good work on Facebook through local chapters and (in my dreams) get my hands on guideline document that explains to local chapters how they should go about creating the page in accordance with the NGOs.

Anyone out there have good examples ?

Thanks

• Neil

Thinking it through I think that your ScrantonAutoGlass.com and ClevelandRealEstate.com suggestions are bad advice. I appreciate your opinion though!

For a local business the disadvantages from this type of name outweigh  the one advantage you gain by having a better chance of ranking for popular search term. IMO.

This discussion has helped me think it through. Thanks all

• Neil

Hi

(What happened to the User Voice feedback in PRO campaign reports? Another cutback because of scalability?) I'm getting sent here for Help on the reports

It's Friday morning here in France ; I'm preparing a meeting with a client and as part of this I want their Rankings Report from the campaing I set up for them month's ago

Half the keywords are showing up as "SAT" ; the message at the top says "Your keywords are updated weekly on Saturday. The last update was January 26th, 2013"

They're not new keywords, if I click on them I get historic data up untill January 19th

I'm guessing you had a problem on January 26th but why not put January 19th rankings rather than SAT ?

The report is now useless.

Here's the url if useful

http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/54444/rankings

• Neil

You're giving me a lot of examples of online businesses rather than what I imagine my Chamber of Commerce audience was: local businesses who have an existing highstreet identitiy

Hotels.com with the .com is a great brand for the online business that is behind it. Would hotel.com have been a good domain for a hotel in Paris ? I don't think so. But I don't think hotel-paris.com is a good domain either. It might have given you an advantage for this search term but it's crummy and cheap as an online identity.

The examples I'm seeing are like this

www.hotel-restauraunt-town-name.com

www.oil-industry-job-offers.com

Behind each site their is a business that has a business name

It's as if McDonald's had decided to go with www.hamburger-restaurants.com rather than www.mcdonalds.com

15 years down the line whould you suggest they change?

• Neil

Takeshi,

I'm assuming that this sort of anchor text has a negative effect since Penguin

SearchEngineLand.com is not an EMD in my opinion as I don't think that people were searching for a "land of search engines" before the site existed

SeoTools.net is a good example though and for me it's a poor domain name. If I search for "seotools" in Google (here in France) I get seobook, seomoz and a few French sites before I get seotools.net and then seotools.com

• Neil

Hi

I've never recommended exact match domain names as good SEO ; the problem being that they don't help you create brand identity and even when someone remembers your site's name (seo-question-answer-forum.com for example) they are going to type it into Google and they'll see competitors all around the link in the SERP - and you'll probably only have one link, no site links.

In a recent talk at a local Chamber of Commerce I drove this point home again with the new threat of penalties from Penguin (now and moving forward) and a reported EMD penalty that may or not be active in France.

So I've pretty much convinced everyone that EMD's are now toxic and if they are thinking of launching a new site they should avoid them.

But what if you have one already? I've had this question from people that were in the audience. Should they leave their domain now and set up a new site?

Not sure how I should answer!

The question comes from Chamber of Commerce audience and therefore people with bone fide businesses - so my gut feeling for the initial reasons above is "Yes" ; not using your company name as your main online identity was an error and you should correct it now. Create a new domain name and move to it via a simple 301 rewrite rule

But am I right? Or are there cases where this is bad advice

• Neil in France

Damion,

Thanks for the reply.

I do use advanced segments and it's also easy getting info from the All Traffic Sources report

But I do have some cases where one site can contain natural editorial links and paid banner ad links. Other cases where a page can have different types of links: on a banner or text link.

We're thinking about using analytics to distinguish these ; but I think that you're right, the main drag will be making sure that all links are actually updated correcly.

• Neil

Hi

I'm working on a real estate agents web site which has a lots of links coming from paid listings in real estate linstings sites (this in France so I'm not sure examples will mean anything but basically the agents have 900 house listings in each site and each listing has a backlink)

In analytics these are classified as referals and that's fine for the moment

But because sites provide different types of links, we are considering tagging all paid links with analytics utm codes. Mainly to learn which ads are actually providing qualified traffic (providing contacts).

I'm guessing that currently these links, there are thousands, bring seo value to my client's web site and are not considered as paid links.

Will adding the analytics codes to these links cause a loss of their value by clearly indicating to Google that we paid for them?

What's the current thinking on this? I'm tempted not to be worried about being honest about the origin of these links but I'm worried that there is a real danger of loosing current ranking

Any arguments FOR tagging paid links ?

Thanks for you help

• Neil

Hang on !

I would definitely avoid "301 back to the root page for jobs" or even a category page.

Over time, you are going to be creating a massive index of empty pages linking to a home page; that looks too spammy to me. If you want to be honest : 404 these pages- the job offer no longer exists, the page no longer exists --- you can personalise your 404 page to send the user to a relevant page

Honesty doesn't always pay though! To leverage the SEO benefits from these pages I would consider archiving the job listing, keeping the same url and just adding a message indicating that the post has been filled (an image will do)

That way, you’re keeping lots of unique content on your site and over time creating a log of pages.

To make these archived job pages useful to the user and to the search engines, dynamically add links to fresher job offers in the same category, company and town.

-       Neil

PS Does this new SeoMoz feature now mean I'm now paying to give free advise ?

Hi Geraldine

A client of ours used http://www.regus.fr/ to set up an address in Paris for this purpose and later opened a real office - and a real French company - when sales increased. Regus have offices worldwide see http://www.regus.fr/country-selector.aspx so I imagine that they can help for all countries.

I'll add to Gianluca's comments that Google won't be "fooled" by this address into recognising you as a French company. Google checks this through access to company registration databases rather than its own My Business listings.

But there are plenty of other advantages in having a My Business listing and Paris would be a good base in France for your site (audience reach). For an e-commerce site, potential clients will be reassured by a local telephone number too.

Looking at the French site, I noticed that the HREFLANG is incorrectly implemented. This is more important than the postal address. I strongly suggest you correct that

• Neil

As an SEO you're obliged to say translate all the folder names.

If you want to optimize your site for search engines, it is strongly recommended to use keywords in the Urls of the pages you'd like to see in the SERPs ; Its not compulsory, though, and with non-competitive terms you may get good rankings without it. A lot of sites have urls like mysite.com/index.php?page=123 and still rank well

A German site has German keywords obviously and you should have these words in your Url if you want an optimized site

If you're saying that technical reasons you can't do this, you'll have to make extra efforts elsewhere

Make sure that you have a fully translated breadcrumbs and navigation menus ... but if you can do this you shouldn't really be that far off translating the urls

• Neil