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Silkstream,

Are you sure that those pages actually have real penalties or is it algo changes?

Also, when you search your keyword phrases... what sorts of results show up in the SERPs? Does the local 7-pack show up?  If so, then your Google+ Local listing would most likely be what would get you to rank for those 'local' terms.

Do you have physical offices in each of the towns represented by the 'category+town' pages ... along with corresponding G+ Local pages for each?  If not, you may have difficulty ranking for many towns not close to the epicenter of your actual business address.

Hi Jess,

That doesn't seem to be my exact issue.  I was just wondering about an overall, permanent algo change affecting 'site:' search.

Though we have not received any GWT notices, I'm trying to figure out if Google may be penalizing / lowering the ranking order / omitting ... for whatever reason... some pages we've previously targeted with link building.  Because when I do a site: search, I'd expect to see the more authoritative pages of a website closer to the top of the first page of SERPS.

Russ

I was wondering if anyone has noticed changes in how Google returns 'site:' searches over the past few years or months.

I remember being able to do a search such as "site:example.com" and Google would return a list of webpages where the order may have shown the higher page rank pages (due to link building, etc) first and/or parent category pages higher up in the list of the first page (if relevant) first (as they could have higher PR naturally, anyways).

It seems that these days I can hardly find quality / target pages that have higher page rank on the first page of Google's site: search results. Is this just me... or has Google perhaps purposely scrambled the SERPS somewhat for site: searches to not give away their page ranking secrets?

Any update on 301's passing penalt to a new domain?

Any update on this?

Unfortunately I don't have experience with that.

As per the info you sent via PM... this has managed to be taken care of via GMM (google map maker) at least for now.

Some GMM pros marked the 'other' 2 listings as duplicate of the first, official listing.

I see that the editors/reviewers first changed the addresses of the offending POIs (point of interest) to match the original listing... and also added extra phone numbers into the original listing (to help show Google that it is all the same business.)

Search again... and you'll most likely find that the dealership only has one G+ Local Page appearing.

More info: https://plus.google.com/113059806113646417939/posts/eHbxfnMwWbL

If you like my answer... please mark this accordingly.

Yes, the owner can delete messages, but perhaps you might be able to find something in the indexation history graph or other place.

if you are using tagging (like in WordPress), I'd recommend blocking the tag pages from appearing in your sitemap and from being index by the search engines. It will just look like duplicate content.

Then, in your template, remove the link (or add a nofollow) from that tag that goes to the tag category view so that the keyword doesn't cannibalize your targeting away from the page you are trying to rank for that keyword.

This way, you can use tags as much as you want, and they will add text to your posts, but they won't mess with your indexing and won't create duplicate content issues.

Scott

I would recommend using opensiteexplorer.org to find out what type of links the site has coming towards it (you might have already done this). Also, do you have access to the domain owner's Google Webmaster Tools account? perhaps you could poke around there first if they will allow you access.

Scott

Hi Ben, if it works in GWT but not showing in Google results, it's probably because Google doesn't think that page is important enough to show rich snippets. It is probably eligible, but not mandatory for Google to show.

I agree. The text is too over-optimized. It might scare customers aware because it is not so natural sounding.

That's a tough one to answer. In a few years, the 301 redirects might get out of hand. Perhaps just creating a good 404 page with options to view other related products might work instead.

I'd say blog commenting is still ok, so long as you don't try to stuff your link and target anchor text in every comment possible. You should mix it up and try to start a conversation, and then maybe in your second reply, drop a link to your site.

Many blog comments are NoFollow anyways, so they won't pass much or any SEO juice along to your site. It might, however, attract visitors to you site.

Scott O.

Instead of deleting a product can you instead just mark it as zero in stock / inventory? I'm not sure you still want the page to appear to visitors or not, but that might be the best way to avoid broken links. Just leave the page up and add a "not in stock" message to the page?

Otherwise, 301 redirects to an appropriate category or product might help. there might be external websites linking to some of these product pages and if you leave it as a 404, it will not pass link juice along, but if you do a 301, then the link juice can continue to follow.

Scott O.

How are all of these subdomains being created? Do you have just one subdomain you are worried about or multiple subdomains?

If you can do a robots.txt disallow on certain duplicate folders/files that you don't want indexed, that might help.

Let me know some more info first.

Scott.

How do you control which version visitor see? Are you sending PPC ads to a page based on the time of day, or are you just wondering about organic traffic?

It might be easier to give an answer if we could see the two pages you are talking about.

However, I'll ask, do other pages on your site link back to these pages? or do the subpages just link back to the index.html only?

Scott O.

I wouldn't say "equal". But I do believe each site would provide additional opportunity.

3 articles per week per site isn't a bad frequency to be posting.

Also, as it is now you have the chance to interlink one site to another if there is a related topic.

Handling all those 301's if you were to combine all the sites into one would be quite the ordeal.

In my opinion, with only one site, you'd have only one chance to rank in the search engines. With 3 sites, you could potentially have more opportunity to rank.

Who is making that recommendation? Is it a company that has something to gain by advising you to redo your site(s)?

Scott

Here:

http://scott.offord.me/NiAE

http://scott.offord.me/NicJ

http://scott.offord.me/Ni0y

I think one site would make sense.

When I do a Google search for certain phrases that I find on your website, I see a lot of duplicate content. How much of your website's content is completely unique?

It will help if you get a copywriter to write from scratch instead of piecing sentences together from other sites.

Also, you could always "nofollow" the outgoing links if you were afraid of giving credit to them.

It looks like Google is showing the "Street View" map image instead of the image you uploaded.

So, this is your listing? https://maps.google.com/maps?cid=1552403007127876102

When you go here: http://www.google.com/local/add/ and log in with that account, do you see the listing? If so, that's where you'd edit the image.

I believe this is the Google Map Maker POI (Point of Interest) for that listing. Does that look right? http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=39&fid=0x89e37717ebe05e89:0xbc2be1f7aabc9ee5

And this is the Google + Page, right? https://plus.google.com/117400845160255741148/

Scott O.

I don't see www.totalpetsuppies.co.uk/sitemap.aspx are you sure that's where you sitemap is?

Have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools and looked for broken links / crawl errors (404 errors)?

Scott

Have you tried adding this 404 page to IIS -> Website properties -> Custom Errors tab, then under 404, point to the web page that you would like to show up when a file is not found?

What are the cities?

How many links are going TO each of these pages (external and internal)?

What is the anchor text coming into these pages?

Are they all listed in your sitemap.xml?

When you do a "brand name + location" search, are you changing your browser's location settings?

Example: http://scott.offord.me/NiQD

Scott O.

What is the CID of your listing?

For example: http://www.orionweb.net/2012/03/20/gain-reviews-to-increase-your-google-places-listing-rank/ read the bottom of this post.

Also, what is the Name of the company? It's possible that you have more than one listing or perhaps Google is pulling in a photo from another authoritative website.

Scott

I think a press page would be a good addition. It wouldn't harm your rankings to link out to quality news sites. You could summarize each mention/link with your own paragraph of text to give the links context.

Scott O.

Perhaps laziness. Perhaps it's just someone who came up with a good solution that worked for themselves and then wanted to make money off of selling it to others

Yes, anything deeper would also be blocked.

Gregory, You were able to find the site he was talking about? Or did you look at your case study?

There is always a chance it could be seen as cloaking, but I think this instance is a legitimate reason to do it. You aren't blatantly trying to manipulate the search engines for your gain. You are trying to help the users first and please the search engines second, so I think it should work fine.

Try adding something like this to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /product/samples/product/
Disallow: /product/samples2/product1/
Disallow: /product/samples3/product4/

etc...

If you have control over your hosting, you normally can log in to the server's hosting control panel and see stats there. Are you currently using Google Analytics on your site? If so, you might want to check if the data is still going in to that profile and that your tracking script is still embedded on all pages of your website.

Scott O.

If you feel I have been helpful, please choose "Good Answer". Thanks!

Is it on a .com or another TLD? What geographical area do you have your Google Webmaster Tools set to target? It might be easier to create a whole new website so you can target each continent separately, especially if you have a co.uk domain.

What tool are you using to measure this? Does your server's webstats support this data? It is odd that there would be zero. Especially if you still rank in the search engines and if you are still getting referral and direct traffic.

Did ReachLocal put a robots.txt disallow or a meta noindex on that site?

If not, best bet would be to ask them to do so. It is possible that without that directive, their new site could be starting to rank organically.

I'd recommend adding a campaign in your SEOmoz account to start rank tracking their new site to see if it is indeed ranking for your desired keywords or not.

Scott O.

P.S. If you enjoyed my response, please consider marking it as a "Good Answer".

I don't think it is necessary to use WP multisite to achieve those results. Here are some resources for you:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6774424/wordpress-disable-plugin-on-specific-pages-posts

That article mentions this Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugin-organizer/

Scott O.

I would suggest using Pagination. If you were able to allow the visitor to filter by best selling, most reviewed, newest, lowest price, etc, that might solve the potential problem of having multiple pages if you do decide to use pagination.

However, if you are planning to use Ajax to show the paginated results, that could be a good solution, but the pagination navigation would somehow have to be in regular HTML so the search engines could still spider it.

I'd also recommend using rel=canonical rel=prev rel=next if you do use pagination.

Scott O.

P.S. If you feel I have been helpful, please consider marking this as "Good Answer".

Each Google accounts has separate G+ profiles. You can have multiple Google Plus Pages in a profile, but only one personal profile in that account.

If you want to keep things separate from your personal name, you could perhaps use a pen name for your blog site. A Google Plus profile requires a real name, but I don't think it would hurt to create a pen name for your blog's Gmail account.

Here's some resource material for you that I found while searching this morning: http://www.modea.com/blog/relauthor-relpublisher-seo-today

Scott O.

If you are familiar with .htaccess files, you can add a 301 redirect from the old page to the new page.

Otherwise, I recommend you install the Redirection WordPress plugin instead: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

Regarding the link from sunsetdianivilla.com, that's too bad the domain name expired 

Scott O.

P.S. If you feel I have answered your question, please feel free to select "Good Answer".

I would recommend reporting this as you can.

Otherwise, there are other ways to get Google's attention (and the Map reviewing community) by using http://www.google.com/mapmaker

PM me if you need more info on that.

Scott O.

So long as the random content you are adding actually provide value to the visitors' visit, I'd say go for it. Scott O.

Going from around 45 to 75 linking domains doesn't seem unnatural at first glance. I'm wondering though, what the quality of those links are like? Was it deserved links from real people sharing your content or mostly traditional link directories and social bookmarking, etc?

Interesting proposal, but you state, "I currently only submit 1 a month" and you say that the subscription is "1 release a month for 12 months". So, do you mean you'd change your frequency so you'll only use 6 of the 12?

Scott O.

Good question. Hopefully an SEOmoz staffer can pick this up and get an answer to you.