Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

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 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

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

Dear Mozzers, We have implemented schema.org on our website and it's showing up as being correct. However, I've been told by a SEO company that what we have done is incorrect and is therefore giving out wrong signals to google and that it needs fixing but they haven't told me whats wrong with it. Would someone please be able to have to have a quick scan and highlight anything that is not correct. I have enclosed 4 urls belows of the different sections of my website. My website homepage - is -- http://goo.gl/2F80w2 We have a number of branches- An example branch url is - http://goo.gl/8FpcaS example category url - http://goo.gl/gbAaD2 example product url - http://goo.gl/EXI1Sr Any assistance would be greatly appreciated Many thanks
Peter

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. |

Hi Mozzers Ive noticed that I have some 302 redirects on my website which have been there for some time . They should really 301's but I am wondering if 302s pass link juice or not as from what I've read they don't so I just wanted to check if anyone knew for sure, thanks pete

Dear Mozzers, I have an issue with my UK Website (short url is - http://goo.gl/dJ7IgD  ) whereby when I type my company name in to google.co.uk search the .com version returns in Search as opposed to the .co.uk and from looking at open site explorer the page rank of the .com is higher than the .co.uk ?. Infact I cant even see the .co.uk homepage version but other pages from my site. The .com version is also 301'd to the .co.uk. From looking at Open Site Explorer, I have noticed that we have more links pointing to .com as opposed to .co.uk.   Alot of these are from our own separate microsites which we closed down last year and  I have noticed the IT company who closed them down for some reason 301'd them to the .com version of our site as opposed to the .co.uk but If I look in http://httpstatus.io/  (http status checker tool) to check one of these mircosites it shows - 301 - 302 - 200 status codes which to me looks wrong ?. I am wondering what it should read ... e.g should it just be a 301 to a 200 status code ?. My Website short url is - http://goo.gl/dJ7IgD   and an example of some of 10 microsites we closed down last year which seems to be redirected to .com is http://goo.gl/BkcIjy   and http://goo.gl/kogJ02 As these were redirected almost a year ago - it is okay if I now get them redirected to the .co.uk version of my site or what should I do ? They currently redirect to the home page but given that each of the microsites are based on an individual category of my main site , would it be better to 301 them to the relevant category on my site. My only concern is that , may cause to much internal linking and therefore I wont have enough links on my homepage ? How would you suggest I go about building up my .co.uk authority so it ranks betters than the .com- I am guessing this is obviously affecting my rankings and I am losing link juice with all this. Any advice greatly appreciated . thanks Pete

Hello Mozzers. We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site. examples - site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked. We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do. It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc. Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8 thanks Pete

Hello Mozzers, We have restructured our site and have done many 301 redirects to our new url structure. I have seen one of my competitors have done similar but they have kept the old sitemap to assist google I guess with their 301's as well. At present we only have our new site map active but am I missing a trick by not have the old one there as well to assist google with 301's. thanks Pete

Hi Mozzers, I have a query regarding canonical tags on my eCommerce site.. Basically on my category pages whereby I have more than 1 page, I currently use next/prev rel and also have a canonical tag pointing to the View all version of that page. This is believe is correct.(see example - http://goo.gl/2gz6LV However, from looking at the view source on my other pages,  I have noticed I have canonical tags on all my category pages which are only a single page and these canonicaltag are pointing to a different url. I enclose an example . Please advise Category page - http://goo.gl/Pk4zYl This is where the canonical tag points to  - http://goo.gl/EwKv26 Another example Category Page - http://goo.gl/4gWTdD This is where the canonical tag for that page points to http://goo.gl/qm4HV7 Should I either make sure that categories that are only 1 page , don't have a canonical tag at all ? or do I have a canonical tag on say every page on my website for safety pointing to the main url for that page. The later, I imagine would be a belt and braces approach but I don't want to screw up anything if it's not advised? Please help/ Kind regards Pete

Hi Mozzers, I have what is classed as doorway pages on my website. These have historically been location specific landing pages for some of our categories but from speaking to a number of different webmasters , then general consensus is that they are not in google guidelines so I will be getting punished by having them. My options are : I can 301 the pages back to their original category pages . This will conserve some link juice to pass back to the respective category page. I can set these as Follow No index. Not sure what will happen here with regards to link value etc. What would be best ?... Some of the pages do currently rank "fairly well" for some of the locations so I am getting traffic from them but I also know I will be getting a algorithmic penalty for having them so how best I clean these up ?. Also , by cleaning up the site structure , would I see any benefit here ? or will I have to wait for a new panda update/ refresh ? I thought the panda refresh won't use a new dataset thanks Pete

Hello Mozzers, I am wondering how do you rank for categories locally where when you operate from multiple branches. Currently our eCommerce website has location pages for every category but I know that this is now classed as doorway pages and spammy so I am in the process of sorting out our site structure. I understand that the general format for having sites with multiple branches is to have a branch page per physical location and that's about it. Is there any more to this ? However, What confuses me though, is that if you offer all these services in all these branches, how are you going to rank for them locally if you don't have a specific page for each of them in that location? So for example - We rent Carpet cleaners , floor sanders, generators in each of our different branches. My site currently has a carpet cleaner hire <location>url , floor sander hire <location>url and a generator hire <location>url.  Every branch has a url for each of my categories.</location></location></location> So if I was to get rid of all of my location category pages. How am I going to rank for these renting these products in different cities where our branches does without having specific location pages for them ? Is it just a case that google knows that because I have branch pages at locations x, y, x , then my carpet cleaner , floor sander and generator category pages will rank locally in those locations providing I have decent citations etc etc etc thanks
Pete

Hi Mozzers, One of my competitors uses a trick whereby they have a number of different sitemaps containing location specific urls for their most popular categories on their eCommerce store. It's quite obvious that they are trying to rank for keyword <location>and from what I am see,  you cant to any of these pages from their website navigation or search , so it's like these pages are separated from the main site in terms of accessing them but you can access the main website pages/navigation the other way round (i.e if you select one of the pages from finding it in serps) </location> I know that google doesn't really like anything you can't access from the main website but would you class this as blackhat ? / cheating etc ...  They do tend to rank quite well for these  alot of the pages and it hasn't seem to have affected pages on their main website in terms of rankings. I am just wondering , if it's worth us doing similar as google hasn't penalised them by the looks of things.. thanks Pete

Hi All, We are having a go at doing our own link building and just wanted some advice on a couple of questions I've found some industry related blog sites which could be good but alot of them only offer a no follow link ?. Is this worth it ? And if ,so what is the advantage of having a no follow link ? as it won't directly help with our DA etc ? I've also noticed some of these sites link to each other or recommend each other (i.e other blog sites) which may be some sort of link network ?.. I take it this is bad ? and could be penalized by google ? thanks pete

Hi All, We have lots of articles on our news page of our website. Should we add one of us as the author to gain Author Rank points so to speak ?.. Have not done anything previously with this but just wondered if we were missing a trick here thanks Pete

Hi Mozzers, I've been looking at the View Source on my landing pages , and it looks to me that my H1 Tag etc is not in the head but in the body . My developer says its in the correct place , but can someone please confirm as it looks wrong to me. short url link - http://goo.gl/vfXeut Many thanks Pete

Hi Mozzers, I read on SEJ yesterday than apparently the Panda update was due in the 2 - 4 weeks. I still have a large of my products which I have not got around to rewriting unique product descriptions for. I know these product descriptions are duplicated on other affiliate sites so do it think it in light of the panda update coming , would it wise to put a NO INDEX Meta tag on these product pages until I get around to rewriting the descriptions.  That way, I may not hit my Panda and it will buy me a bit more time. Just an idea , but thought I'd run it by. thanks Pete

Hi Mozzers, My on page content comes under my H2 tag. I have a few subheadings within my content to help break it up etc and currently this is just underlined (not bold or anything) and I am wondering from an SEO perspective, should I be making these sub headings H3 tags. Otherwise , I just have 500-750 words of content under an H2 tag which is what I am currently doing on my landing pages. thanks pete

Hi Mozzers, I am going through my categories on my eccomerce hire site trying to improve things and just wanted to check this query with you My understanding is that if I have the same H1 and title tag, then that would give more weight for that keyword phrase? Would I also be correct in assuming that the H1 is more important than the title tag or should both be treated as equals in terms of SEO. My dimemla is that for certain products we hire, there's only really one clear winner in terms of keyword phrase. The others I find in keyword planner are way down the volume list , so I have tended to put the H1 and title tag as the same and then have H2 tag and a slightly different heading. Is that the best philosphy or should I really mix them up , so the the title tag, h1, h2 are different ? Also Currently My on page content mentions the the H1 tag near the beginning of the content. Is this correct or should I really be using the H2 tag phrase near the beginning of the content. For example - One of the products we hire out is carpet cleaners. Therefore the main keyword phrase is carpet cleaner hire
and for our local pages its' carpet cleaner hire <city name="">.
This is my title tag and H1 tag and then for my h2 tag , I have something like "carpet cleaning equipment" with the content
mentioning carpet cleaner hire near the beginning.</city> I don't want to look likes its over optimization or mention the word hire to much but being a hire website, it's difficult not to and other keywords that don't mention it in it, are to varied so could increase bounce rates ?. When I look in GWT against my content keywords - the word hire shows a full bar. Just wondered what peoples thoughts are if what I am doing it okay?
thanks
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

Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete

Hi Mozzers, I am wondering if someone could advise if there's anything obvious here as to why my local landing pages suck ranking wise even though I have done all of the following.  http://goo.gl/Lr4HXa I am trying to rank for Garden tool hire Bristol on my landing page. Main category page is garden tool hire Consitant NAP - Citations. Local branch address on Page , in title tag, H1 tag and the address is in on page content which is unique. Schema.org has been set up with address in this aswell etc. Pagination set up and view all page has concanical tag pointing to page 1 Speed not an issue as this is a fast site. Currently all the product links on the page are H3 tags but I've seen this on lots of other sites. All my NAP Citations point to the parent branch pages although I don't have any individual deep links pointing to this page. Unique Content I currently don't have internal links to relevant articles on my blog page as I have those on my main category landing page as you can see here  -  http://goo.gl/sO9A9U but I can add these as well to all my location specific landing pages if you think it would help. Any thoughts greatly appreciated Pete

Dear Mozzers, I have been looking at my news section on my eCommerce site and I think I may have a duplicate content issue and wanted some advice on whether I do and if so , how best I handle this. http://www.website.co.uk/news
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:1
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:2
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:3
http://www.website.co.uk/news/limit:9999 (This is show all) I also have the ability of showing articles by month : http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/04 (April)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/03 (March)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/02 (Feb)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/01 (Jan) I am wondering if there's a duplicate issue here or not given that I also articles by month as well and if so how best I handle this.? I already do pagination on my news pages (page 1 , page 2) by using rel=next and rel=Prev but I don't have an canconical or anything as yet. I enclose a couple of links if this would help and would appreciate if someone could take a browse. I have a View All link on my homepage for for all news items - http://goo.gl/JPPIvQ I which have a different urls - March 2015 Articles - http://goo.gl/0O1wYD and April 2015 articles - http://goo.gl/GdW2oK On another note, These articles are also linked to from the relevant category landing pages on my website to help with SEO. I have not used H tags on the article links in my landing pages , just displaying the weblink back to the news article.I've done this to try and improve the PR and rankings of my landing pages. Just wondered if anyone has any comments as to whether thats a good or bad idea and whether I could improve it in any way - An example is here (scroll down the page to the pressure washing guides) - http://goo.gl/nnRE49 Thanks Pete

Hi All, We are a UK Company with Uk customers only and use CloudFlare CND. Our Site is hosted by a UK company with servers here but from looking online and checking where my site is hosted etc etc , some sites are telling me the name of our UK Hosted company and other sites are telling me my site is hosted in San Fran (USA) , where I presume the Cloudflare is based. I know Cloudflare has a couple of servers in the UK it uses but given all my customers are UK based ,I don't want this is affect rankings etc , as I thought it was a ranking benefit to be hosted in the country you are based. Is there any issue with this and should I change or is google clever enough to know so i shouldn't worry. thanks Pet

Hi All, We made our Website mobile responsive well in advance of the recent mobile algorithm changes . We only have a couple of pages with minor errors but yet our mobile rankings have not improved that much (maybe 1 place) and in alot of cases, we rank higher on desktop than we do on mobile for the same term etc. No the ranking boost is minimal at best and worse in many cases. I have checked our site on google mobile test and we are mobile friendly and on page speed test our mobile site is 99/100 user experience etc. Just wondered if anyone else has found the same ? thanks Pete

Hi All, We are currently writing some "How to do" articles on our tool hire website and as there is alot of DIY related you tube videos out there, we thought It would be good to link to some of these at the bottom of our articles. From an SEO perspective, is there any do's and don'ts with regards how we should implement this. We are unable to do our videos so linking to others would be our preferred option. Does anyone know if this would give an SEO ranking benefit even though it's an outbound link to someone's video etc. thanks Pete

Hi All, We have started to use a 3rd party review company and now have the choice of either implementing their re-supplied widgets (Java ) on our site showing customer reviews or use their an API to get this information. The widgets (Java) , would be loaded once the page is actually loaded so I am not sure how and if google will read this information if at all?  If we use a widget then we won't be able to implement it with Schema.org although we will be able to use rich snippets to it will appear on any PPC (once we have had 30 reviews). If we go down the API route, it's more expensive for us but we can use the review schema.org for this. Does anyone have any experience of what works best for them ?.. We have a choice of having a widget showing latest reviews or just a badge (which is actually a link to the review site showing our reviews). From an SEO point of view, is one better than the other ? Does google actually read the content of the review or is the link back to the 3rd party review company sufficient enough to help with rankings etc. Am I correct in assuming that by linking to a 3rd party review company and showing our reviews on our site , this will help with rankings as even though the content in the reviews doesn't really say much ,. I did see it was a ranking factor  on the survey but not sure how google uses this. ? I've read up some information on reviews etc but wondered what the general consensus was with what others found works best for them Any help greatly appreciated Pete

Hi All, We use schema.org on most of our eCommerce website apart from on our "latest news/blog section" which we have all our how to's ...and other useful articles on . Am I missing a trick here ?.. I have found there is a https://schema.org/Article  which I guess we could implement if it's a big help or if there's a better one ? Just wondered peoples thought as whether it is must have from an SEO/ranking point of view thanks Pete

Hi All, I read an interesting answer from Tom Roberts on another question and one of things he mentioned was that there are conflicting reports about "Click to Expand " Content being discounted with a link to the article  - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html My eCommerce uses this method on every landing page and tabs on our products pages so I am wondering if others had first hand knowledge of whether using these methods had affected their sites or not ?. I may try to experiment on a few pages to remove this and show all content at the bottom but it does kinda ruin the pages a bit so I wanted to know what peoples thoughts were before I screw up my pages and think about page redesign etc etc. Also , if I was to try it ,then how long should I experiment for ?. would a couple of weeks be sufficient providing google crawls them regually thanks Pete

Hi All, We have approx 6,000 - 404 pages. These are for categories etc we don't do anymore and there is not near replacement etc so basically no reason or benefit to have them at all. I can see in GWT , these are still being crawled/found and therefore taking up crawler bandwidth. Our SEO agency said we should 410 these pages?.. I am wondering what the difference is and how google treats them differently ?. Do anyone know When should you 410 pages instead of 404 ? thanks Pete

Hi All, We got a penalty Last March 2014 ( Side Wide Link - unnatural links) which we recovered from quickly and this changed to Partial Match penalty (impact links) which we recovered from back in December 2014. Our Site profile has been cleaned up but our rankings still suck for some of our main keywords (+500) . Also our traffic and local rankings still suck in some cases. From an SEO point of view our site is pretty good,  we've done everything google has recommended including schema.org, mobile responsive, unique content (which we write regulary) and we only have a few duplicate pages. Our domain authority is better than our competitors but yet our rankings and traffic are still no way as good as theirs. Do anyone know if recovering from an impact links penalty take longer than 4 months . I know that google says than it discounts those links but I get the feeling google may be looking at an old dataset due to not rerunning panda & penguin since our penalty was removed and this may be whats affecting things. Does anyone have any ideas? I am more than happy to post my url if someone fancies taking a quick look ? to see if it's anything obvious ? thanks Pete

Hi All, I've been looking at the internal links on my eCommerce site to try and improve PR and get it as efficient as possible so link juice isnt getting wasted etc and I've come across some odd ones I would like some advice on My website currently has between 125-146 links on every page (Sitemap approx 3500 pages). From what I read ,the ideal number of links is under 100 but can someone confirm is this is still the case ?..Is it a case of less is more , in terms of improving a page PR etc ? in terms of link juice strength etc so it's not getting diluted to unnecessary pages. One of my links is a bad url ( my domain + phone number for reason) which currently goes to a 404 page ?. - Is this okay or do we need to track down the link and remove it. I don't want link juice getting wasted as it's on every page. Another one of my links is my domain.name/# and another one with some characters after the # which both to the home page. Example www.domain.co.uk/#   and www.domain.co.uk#abcde   both go to homepage.  Is this okay or  am I potentially getting duplicate content as If I put these urls in , they go to my home page. I have a link on every page which opens up outlook (email) on the contact us. Should this really be changed to a button with a contact us form opening up instead ? I currently have 9 links on the bottom on every page i.e About it , delivery , hire terms,.contact us , trade accounts , privacy, sitemap.  When I check , these pages seem to be my strongest pages in terms of PR. Is that because they are on every page?.. Should I look to reduce these links as they are accessible from the navigation menu apart from privacy and sitemap. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated ? thanks Pete

Hi All, I currently have location specific pages and my branch information(NAP) is currently displayed at the bottom in the page content. I was thinking off displaying the NAP again higher up the page so it's very visible for the user possibly under a h tag heading as well. Do you think it would be spammy or harm my seo efforts it my NAP was displayed twice on a page ?.  Once in the content which currently it's not visible unless the user clicks on the read more link in the content on the bottom of the page , and again further up the page where I have some white space which I can utilize Any thoughts greatly appreciated. thanks Peter

Hi All, My ecommerce site has different category/landing pages for each of my branches . I'm currently getting some more citations done as wondered the following Is it a general rule to say, that the more citations you have the better as long as they are consistent and free? Given that I have different categories /landing pages showing the NAP of my individual branches along with unique content, should all these extra citations help with local rankings across my whole site or is it usually just helping the specific localized webpage it's pointing to ? I can get a company to help me do my citations but to do all the branches, it is going to be quite expensive. Is citations quite a big individual SEO factor in local search as opposed to on page seo factors etc etc. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter

Hello All, On our eCommerce site some products have additional information which we currently show via a PDF link next to the product. I am thinking, is it more beneficial from an SEO point of view , If I was to put this additional pdf information to a webpage and have a link going from the product to this . From what I read, google cannot read contents of pdfs so if I was to have this as webpage via a link , then the product page would get more keywords and strength around it which would help improve it's seo etc. Just wondered if this is the best way forward or not ? thanks Peter

Hi All, I have a number of branches as we have separate branch pages and separate google local listings for these. I have been trying to keep them in consistent for citation purposes but google keeps trying to tweak the address in the local listings. Sometimes for example , google is trying to remove the premises number from the Road e.g  78 Doncaster Road is the actual branch address but google local business wants it as Doncaster Road, I also see Google is wanting to sometimes remove the locality name etc?.. Also If the local listing has a county ( in America - you would have State) , google is sometimes wanting to remove this add United Kingdom in Country instead ?. Is this a problem and how to deal with it as I think this is obviously impacting my local rankings?. If i approve all these changes then do I need update all my citations and page addresses all the time ? Or can I just leave the suggested "Update" or overwrite googles suggestion with what I had originally. Does anyone else have this problem ? thanks pete

Hi All, I use pagination (Rel=Prev , Rel=Next) and a canconical tag on my paginated pages and also on my View All page to point to my root page (Page 1). My thoughts are am I missing a trick by having the same H1 and H2 tag on each of my paginated pages ? Should I having different ones on say Page 2, 3,4 and view all , to give the Collective Page better SEO . Just wondered what peoples thoughts here were ?. thanks Pete

Hello All, On my ecommerce landing pages, I currently have links to my products as H3 Tags. I also have useful guides displayed on the page with links useful articles we have written (they currently go to my news section). I am wondering if I should put those article links as additional H3 tags as well for added seo benefit  or do I have to many tags as it is ?. A link to my Landing Page I am talking about is - http://goo.gl/h838RW Screenshot of my h1-h6 tags - http://imgur.com/hLtX0n7 I enclose screenshot my guides and also of my H1-H6 tags. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks Peter

Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter

Hello All, We are looking at our internal links and most of them say "More" or "View All" The "more" anchor Text links - are usually positioned on the Body Content as we only display a portion of the content and then the user clicks more to see all the content ? - Should we be changing the "More" Text to something more keyword /phrase friendly i.e " more information about carpet cleaning" or "more information on Tool hire"  or would that be deemed as spammy ? thanks Peter

Hi All, Screaming frog has identified that we have a few H2 tags on our pages , although we only have 1 H1 tag. We have numerous H3,H4's etc. I am wondering, is it good SEO to have only 1 H2 tag like with H1 tag or can you have more ? thanks Peter

Dear All, We have an xml and image site map but we currently don't have a separate GEO Site Map / map files for our branches. I am wondering if such a thing exists and if so , if this something that we should be doing to help our branches rank locally on google maps etc. We have google local listings for our branches and we already do schema.org for our branches. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. thanks Peter

Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev"  and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't  have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter

Hello All, I have a eCommerce site and we operate out of mulitple locations. We currently have individual location pages for these locations against each of our many categories. However on the flip slide , this create alot of duplicate content. All of our location pages whether unique or duplicated have a unique title Tag, H1, H2 tag , NAP and they all bring in the City Name . The content on the duplicated content also brings in the City name as well. We have been going through our categories and writing unique content for our most popular locations to help rank on local search. Currently I've been setting up 301 redirects for the locations in the categories with the duplicated content pointing back to the category page. I am wondering whether the increase in number of 301's will do more harm than having many duplicate location pages ?.. I am sure my site is affected by the panda algorithm penalty(on the duplicated content issues) as a couple of years ago , this didn't matter and we ranked top 3 for pretty much for every location but now we are ranking between 8 - 20th depending on keyword. An Alternative I thought,  may be to instead of 301 those locations pages with duplicate content, is to put No Follow tags on them instead ?... What do you think ?. It's not economically viable to write unique content for every location on every category and these would not only take years but would cost us far to much money. Our Site is currently approx 10,000 pages Any thoughts on this greatly appreciated ? 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

Hello All, I have an Ecommerce Site specializing in Hire and we have individual location pages on each of our categories for each of our depots. All these pages show the NAP of the specific branch Given the size of our website (10K approx pages) , it's physically impossible for us to write unique content for each location against each category so what we are doing is writing unique content for our top 10 locations in a category for example , and the remaining 20 odd locations against the same category has the same content but it will bring in the location name and the individual NAP of that branch so in effect I think this thin content. My question is , I am quite sure I we are getting some form of algorithmic penalty with regards the thin/duplicate content.  Using the example above , should we 301 redirect the 20 odd locations with the thin content , or should be say only 301 redirect 10 of them , so we in effect end up with a more 50/50 split on a category with regards to unique content on pages verses thin content for the same category. Alternatively, should we can 301 all the thin content pages so we only have 10 locations against the category and therefore 100% unique content. I am trying to work out which would help most with regards to local rankings for my location pages. Also , does anyone know if a thin/duplicate content penalty is site wide or can it just affect specific parts of a website. Any advice greatly appreciated thanks Pete

Hello All, We want to split up our Sitemap , currently it's almost 10K pages in one xml sitemap but we want to make it in smaller chunks splitting it by category or location or both. Ideally into 100 per sitemap is what I read is the best number to help improve indexation and seo ranking. Any thoughts on this ? Does anyone know or any good tools out there which can assist us in doing this ? Also  another question I have is that should we put all of our products (1250) in one site map or should this also be split up in to say products for category etc etc ? thanks Pete

Hi All, We have been streaming our site and got rid of thousands of pages for redundant locations (Basically these used to be virtual locations where we didn't have a depot although we did deliver there and most of them was duplicate/thin content etc ). Most of them have little if any link value and I didn't want to 301 all of them as we already have quite a few 301's already We currently display a 404 page but I want to improve on this. Current 404 page is -  http://goo.gl/rFRNMt I can get my developer to change it, so it will still be a 404 page but the user will see the relevant category page instead ? So it will look like this -  http://goo.gl/Rc8YP8   . We could also use Java script to show the location name etc... Would be be okay ? or would google see this as cheating. basically I want to lower our bounce rates from these pages but still be attractive enough for the user to continue in the site and not go away.  If this is not a good idea, then any recommendations on improving our current 404 would be greatly appreciated. thanks Pete

Hi All, I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design. My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view. My question is , previously in our list views we  just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc.. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?... Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc. Any advice greatly appreciated as always thanks Pete

Hi All, I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago. My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website. We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore. Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store. Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but  I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords. We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right. Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?. I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ? Or is all this expected when doing such changes ? Any advice greatly appreciated .. Pete