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Many thanks Moosa, that's pretty much what I thought.

thanks

Pete

Hello Mozzers,

We need to redo some of our meta descriptions as our CTR's are not to good. I've noticed one of my competitors using emoji's which I personally think looks pretty good.

They are using the Phone icon and ticks - as calls to action etc

However, I can't see hardly anyone else using them on general serps ...so I am wondering , is it a bad idea ?

thanks

Pete

Hi Miriam,

Many thanks , I will take a look at the local seo audit. Will keep you posted on the limited experiment etc.

Kind Regards

Pete

Hello Miriam,

Many thanks for your comprehensive and detailed answer. By the 2 approaches you mention, it looks like we did actually originally use approach 2. For a long period until approx 2 years ago, this was very successful until google changed the algorithms . We then went through a process of writing new content of at least 350-500 words for every location/category combo which did improves a little but no way back to where it was. We did however manage to keep probably a larger search visibility footprint than we would have normally had got. On the negative side though, I did think , this could come across as spammy as there is only so many ways one can re-spin similar content without it sounding poor. Also apart from the NAP appearing on the location/category pages, the content wasn't really adding anything unique to that specific location although we did try and localise them by adding in directions , landmarks and major roads etc and other local transport info to get to our depots etc.

Although most, locations/category combos ranked in the top 10-15, most of them were hovering between 6-10 , and only a few top 3. It was def. getting harder and harder to improve on these even with local citations etc and using schema markup.

I posted a couple of questions to John Mueller on a hangout and also to the google webmaster forum  and the general feedback  I got , was that these could be classed as doorway pages. Whilst John Mueller suggested that branch pages were okay, and he did say you could probably have a few location/category pages if you offered a service in that area, he was very non committal and encouraged against doing this technique for obvious reasons although, i think if done correctly, it could work perfectly well for some time to come.

We therefore re-structured our site recently to follow your approach 1 and  setup 301's for our location pages to go back to the relevant category pages. I think this improved the overal internal site structure and we therefore had less link dilution.

We are ranking for our services <city>in serps and in some cases we are ranking exactly the same or slightly better than when we had the combo/location page but the page being returned in serps is the branch page in most cases as opposed to the category page.  I do think this going to be best long term although, I think i will experiment a little by possibly adding a few service pages to one or two of my branches and see how that affects things.</city>

I also think that the internal structure in approach 2 diluted everything far to much and weakened many of my landing pages as a whole.

I also looked at that link you sent regarding the local search audit and ordered the book from Amazon. Will keep you posted on the results from my landing page experiment of adding a couple of service pages to a location or two. But I am glad that It looks like I've been on the right track (thereabouts) with regards to both approaches you mention.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi ,

That is something we are looking to do longer term when budgets allow but I guess in the meantime I should no follow them then ?

thanks

Pete

Dear Mozzers,

I have a couple of questions regarding link juice and whether I should have do follow or no follow links ?

We have an affiliate eCommerce website and on our product pages we have a "Order online " button which will go our subdomain on the manufactures site in order for the user to complete the online ordering process

So it's - www.ourcompany.co.uk  - "Order Online Button" - www.manufactuer.ourcompany.co.uk

1. Should this " Order online Button" be a Follow or No Follow link ?

I ask this as currently from looking at Majestic seo , these "order online " buttons on my product pages seems to be Follow links so am I losing potential link juice by sending it externally ? Am I correct in assuming by changing it to be no follows, I would increase the link juice going elsewhere internally?

thanks

Pete

From what I have been told, the ranking gain is less than the loss in link juice you would have by doing 301's from http to https, therefore there is no actual ranking benefit. If there was , I personally think everyone would be doing it.

Like Chris says above, John Mueller said in a recent hangout,that if you had 2 identical sites in everyway and both was josling for position, then the https would take preference but personally I am waiting for ranking benefit to atleast equal the loss from 301s before I consider doing it.

thanks

Pete

Dear Mozzers ,

I am wondering if someone could please help with some advice and assistance on the following for our Tool hire site:

Basically I like to know how we can rank for our categories for our different branch locations ?.

We have a branch finder page and separate branch pages but I do not know if I should have an internal link from all our branch pages to all my different categories or not or is google clever enough to know that I have x locations and x categories and I should rank all the categories in all the locations. I think my site structure is fairly straightforward and on the face of it similar to what others do who have multiple branches .

For example I enclose a link to 2 of our categories - carpet cleaner hire category and a floor sander hire category

carpet cleaner category - http://goo.gl/cMyS4i

floor sander category - http://goo.gl/4ipUyA

Heres a link to our Branch Finder - http://goo.gl/UyTQdK

Heres a link to one of our Branches for example - Bristol Branch - http://goo.gl/9TXHTK

And heres our link to our google plus Bristol page - google plus bristol branch page - https://goo.gl/h0IwAK . We have link from our bristol page going to the bristol google plus page and visa versa.

Currently within our internal linking structure there is No direct link on the branch pages to the categories ?. Is this something we need to do or not necessary ?. - If we do it , then it may mess up or confuse the page as I someone need to get all the category links on the branch pages ?

We have lots of good unique content , lots of citations for our branches and categories etc but we just don't seem to rank at all well for any of our categories in local search.

For example if somene was to search for - Carpet cleaner hire "City Name " or Floor sander hire "City Name" (City name being where our branches are). We dont rank very well for most of our cities. Even without putting the city name in we dont rank to well in local search.

We used to have individual pages for our categories in each of the cities we have branches with unique content on all and these did rank quite well in a few cities but never top 3 in most and we got rid of these last month (start of Oct) as I was told that google may see this as quite spammy or doorway pages if I have a carpet cleaner hire Bristol page or a floor sander hire Bristol page etc ?.. All my location landing pages now just 301 back to the appropriate category.

I am wondering if getting rid of these landing pages was a good idea as by tidying things up , I've seemed to have lost my local rankings for my cities.

Can someone please advise if what I did was right and what else I should look at doing ?> Could it be an internal linking issue I need to sort ?

Any assistance much appreciated.
thanks
Pete

I asked John Mueller in a recent hangout about 301 redirects and he stated that if you had multiple 301's from the same domain going to a single point i.e homepage , then google may discount many of those 301's and treat them 404's. In my context , it was as I had done a migration and being lazy I 301'd all the urls to the home t. He was saying to map them like for like or you could lose out.

So I guess it depends on your 301's etc..

Pete

We use both rel=next and rel=prev along with a canonical tag pointing to the view all pages on our eCommerce site. As Greenstone mentions above, this is what google recommends.

We also use a Cloudflare CDN (Content delivery Network) which takes care of any speed issue . They offer a free package which you can use to trial it and the paid packages are also very good value  ,approx $20-30 per month by memory but it does make the website lightening quick. It's very easy to setup to.

Pete

Many thanks Andy and Patrick. Some very useful points and links here.  I will take a look and see what I can unravel as to the reasons.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi All,

I am no expert but we have just  done redone our url structure and these are points we had to weigh up.

1. I thought the closer to the root domain the more important the  page ?
2. However, it's always not feasible to have every page only one level from root so what we did , is have the url structure follow the bread crumb structure of our site and I believe this works well
3. That makes it consistent and easy for the user/crawlers to understand
4. Saying that though, if roses are one of your best sellers all year round , then it may warrant to have that url as closer to root as possible still have others using a category structure. I have seen that done on some large sites that sell alot of a particular item

Pete

Hi All,

We have set up all of our Google local for business pages which are verified and these link to the relevant branch pages on our website. The branch pages also link back to the relevant google local page. We only appear for one category on the google local pages and we have also done a large number of citations (NAP) across all locations and the text used in each of the google pages is keyword rich and we mention the city in there as well to localise it.

We have a few google + likes and we have used hootsuite to publish the same content across some of the google local pages which links back to our website blog , we are not appearing in local search whereas our competitors seem to be appear for all their branches.

Is there any fundamental tips or things we need to do to def. get up on the rankings.. Or any good articles worth reading ?.. I've had a look but can't seem to see anything relating a google local business bible..

thanks

Pete

Hi ,

When I look at my google analytics for my UK Website, I can see alot of visits come from outside the UK , i.e Brazil and USA. Both of which give me almost 100% bounce rates from people visiting from there.

I am wondering, if google looks at bounce rates with regards to ranking factors and should I therefore block access to my site from visitors outside the UK ?... Would this help increase my rankings ?

Given that we only serve uk customers, I cant see any benefit of allowing non uk customers the ability to see the site .

what does people think ?

thanks

pete

Hi Monica,

Many thanks . OK cool

Will do

Pete

Hi All,

We have implemented Schema.og on our website and this also includes the local business schema for all of our branches.However I've read an article (see below ) which says we should also be doing "same as " property and linking this to ALL of our citations such as google plus page , yelp , bing places, city search etc etc  as this will help with citations.

I am wondering if anyone has done this ? - And if so , has this helped with local rankings etc - I don't really want to invest the extra costs to get this done if I can't find anywhere that says its made a difference -

The article from whitespark - says - "when you create new citations for your business (or for your client’s), it’s a waiting game hoping that Google and the other search engines will find your new citations quickly and make the connection between those listings, the business, and the website.

The “sameAs” property can help make that process much quicker _and _easier.  Schema.org explains that the “sameAs” property is used along with the “URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's [or business’] identity.”  By using the “sameAs” property in your NAP schema markup, you can tell search engines that the business you’ve marked up is the same one found at a certain citation URL

Of course, Google+ isn’t the only important citation source.  There’s also Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch and a few others. The nice thing about many schema.org properties is that you can use them multiple times in your markup."

I am wondering what peoples thoughts were and whether they has implemented this and if so , did it help ?

thanks

Pete

| [sameAs](http://schema.org/sameAs) | URL  | URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, or official website. |

Many thanks All

Peter

Hello Dirk & Mike

Many thanks for you advice and feedback.

Alot of my categories and landing pages are all within 2 clicks from home so that's a relief that google isn't counting the number of / in the url.

Most of my users don't come through home page as my brand is not well known etc  , I rank for my category landing pages so these are pages I really need to push hence my thoughts on reducing the number of categories on home page to only popular categories as a few of them we have never made any sales from so to push more link juice to the ones we do should help those rankings there otherwise I'm wasting potential link juice to products etc we never sell..

Many thanks for taking the time to explain.

Pete

Many thanks for your insight. I will look at implementing this aswell as it's one part of our schema markup we havent' done. I like your idea on using tag manager to.

Many thanks

Pete

Hello Monica,

Thanks for your response. My concern was the mobile version is responsive so google only reads from htlm file and the CSS Style sheet will control what is displayed to the user. For the mobile, the on page content is not displayed as we went for more of a user experience , fast and efficient as opposed to making it content heavy etc..

I was thinking from a rankings point of view, whether it would affect mobile results if we didn't show this content, even though google will only read the main htlm file which shows the content.. I don't think it's deceptive as google will know its mobile responsive and I have seen other sites not display the content but I was wondering if I was missing a trick here.

thanks

Pete