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Thanks for the tips but I would love to know if you have any experience with receiving a penalty and not recovering your rankings even a year later. Also, its quite confusing that the DA is not bad!  Is that a symptom of a bigger issue?

Hi,

A client of mine who owns a website reached out to me. He got penalized a while ago and has long since recovered (not sure exactly, but for sure a year). His domain authority is in the upper 30s but is still not ranking for many of his keywords that he ranked on the first page.

I am not so familiar with the technical aspects of penalties and such, but is this a common scenario? Why is his domain authority great but his ranking downright awful?

Does he have a chance if he builds great links, or is something else wrong that we can't figure out?

Chris,

I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this thorough answer! Truly proud to be part of such a great community!

You said some really great points and put some of my worries to ease. I will continue link building and making a few corrections.

Thanks again for your helpful advice!

Rachel

Hey Chris,

Thanks for steering me in the right direction way back in May! I was wondering what you'd suggest now... I improved the 50 pages with unique content and disavowed the links I couldn't remove, but I still have that horrible spam score :(.

Should I simply disregard it? Also, does OSE count the links that were disavowed?

Thank you,

Rachel

Hi All!

I'm an experienced SEO freelancer trying to help a company achieve great SEO results

I optimized a lot of pages which helped the site start ranking, but now some keywords are flying up and down seemingly at random. For example, one keyword went from #11 to under #50!

Is it a bad sign when there is instability in the keywords? Should I be seeing some "settling down'' on my dear keywords? If there is no settling, any suggestions?

Hi Chris,

Thanks so much for putting in the time and effort to look into the website and answer my question.

This industry in general is full of spam and doorway pages (probably because of the hardship of getting quality links) but our competitors who have more links and spam are doing better than us and have a better spam score. Do you think if I disavow those links it will help?

You are very right about the pages that seem to be extraneous but I am actively curating content and they will be unique landing pages. Every state has its own laws and quirks in regards to medical waste and we will be focusing on that.

Do you think when I finish those task I will be able to rank better and have a lower spam rate?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks again!

Hi,

I recently took on a client for local SEO and i started improving his on page optimization etc and now I'm continuing with link building. It's hard since it's a boring industry (medical waste disposal), but I have gotten some links.

When I check up his link profile in OSE, it's still giving me a spam score of 7!!! and not showing the links I have acquired. I already removed the link it's showing up by contacting the website and it's not there anymore. The site is a very clean nice site, why am I getting such a high spam score?

Thanks for your help!

Rachel

Hi There!

I've used other options out there like mechanical turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) which can be very successful IF you ask the right questions and give sufficient directions.

Good luck!

Hi Local SEO experts,

A while back we created Google My Business listings for a few of our company locations. A couple of months ago we removed them, because we realized that G might not consider them company locations as they weren't constantly staffed.

Only problem is that they started showing up again. Truthfully I don't mind, but I just want to make sure the business won't get penalized for it. They say "claim this business" on the local listing because it's not claimed by us anymore.

Is this okay or can we get in trouble for it? If it's not okay, how do I go about removing them if I don't have access to it?

Thanks for your time,

Rachel

Hi Logan,

These pages will be eventually transformed into unique landing pages for each state so I don't want to get rid of them as of yet. I will try demoting them.

Any ideas to how they are getting the anchor text of TX and NY?

Thanks for your valuable time!

Hi,

This is an issue that is really upsetting my client. There are sitelinks that are coming up when you search for his business that aren't relevant as the other pages are! I assured him that there is nothing for me to do about it besides for demoting a sitelink, which is simply a suggestion in Google's eyes.

1. I would love to know why they are choosing the titles they are publishing, which is the shortened version of states? Where are they getting it from? I don't have any linking pages with such anchor text. The only thing I can think of is that there is a clickable map that has abbreviated words of that state. Would that do it? How could I change it?

2. Also, why are they choosing pages that are really not the top visited pages on my website instead of the pages that visitors are really interested in?

Here is a snapshot of the issue: http://screencast.com/t/9w9C3DPAHvYb

Thanks!

Hi Josh,

Thanks so much for this link! Finally I was able to talk to someone who guided me what to do

Great question! I would love to hear more answers to this as I have a client in medical waste disposal. I guess you can say I'm in a similar predicament with link-building :).

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for all your help! You gave awesome and clear advice.

Good luck to you,

Rachel

Hi Miriam,

Thanks so much for your detailed advice!

What about the website itself, should I not be mentioning the NYC location at all? For example, right now it's on the contact page with a large Google map.

Thanks,

Rachel

Hi Miriam,

I'm not even sure myself, but when I search for that address, it shows a UPS store and a few other businesses registered on that address (different room numbers). I'm assuming its a mail location. My client did mention to me some sort of secretarial services, but I would have to clarify how in depth those services really are.

Thanks!

Hi Miriam,

Thanks so much for your comprehensive response. The NYC location is the one that my client describes as his headquarters, but in reality there is no one there to service his customers. Even though he has a physical location in NJ there are no customers that ever come down to that fully staffed NJ office. All customers are serviced by phone and because it's a pick up service - their location anyhow, so it's definitely not misleading customers.

That being said, it sounds like I've got the answer. But really my question is more that his business has already been registered and promoted as a NYC location. I think my client feels it sounds more prominent and official to have a business office in Manhattan (pretty understandable). So far, Google has been acknowledging that location too. I only signed up on Moz Local for one location but would expand it to this NYC office if you feel it would be best.

To summarize my question:

Do you feel it is important to remove this location from our website and Google My Business and all web documentation and replace with just our physical NJ address? Or should we just keep it as two locations because so much is set up for this NYC location and build more citations for it?

Thanks for your help,

Rachel

Hi,

I am working on local SEO for a client of mine and was interested to hear what will be recommended in this case:

My client registered his business in a NYC address, for his own business needs. Can I use this address as a second location for the business? There is a secretary taking care of ALL the businesses listed there, but is not a location that services customers. We don't service customers on site at any location because it's a pickup business to begin with, but we do have a fully functional office in NJ

Please don't dismiss this right away, it was registered in NYC and not in NJ and all our information on the web cites this address over our NJ one (obviously i'm working on promoting our NJ one, but that's nowhere to be found on the web).

Miriam,

I really appreciate the lengthy explanation! It helped me feel like you understand what I am trying to accomplish and I will use your words as a guide.

Thanks for all your time and expertise!

Rachel

To add to the question, there are two office locations which I will be creating GMB accounts for. Should I be creating service areas where we have trucks on Google My Business? In other words unchecking that i service customers at my store? Is this better than not having a location at all? Can I do this also if we contract out some of our work to subcontractors in that location?

Hi Miriam,

Thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer this question. One last thing, if the truck drivers officially answer phone calls from their house does that make a difference? Also, it would be less than 10 drivers.

Would you place the driver's home location on the website even if your not creating a GMB account for it?

I hope I'm not beating a dead horse, but this is pretty disappointing for me :).

Thanks again,

Rachel

Hi Miriam,

Does this response still hold true for almost 2016? I am doing local SEO for a business that is more service based, but their drivers have home offices. I am considering putting our truck drivers phone numbers and addresses as locations in the cities we have trucks. Also, can I use their regular local phone number instead of our 1800 number?

Is this strategy risky?

Thanks!

All the best,

Rachel

Hi David,

I was wondering if you can help me with a similar dilemma. I am technically a service area business, but we do have a location in each city/area that we service (to house the equipment and vehicles).

I would like to use Moz Local and do the right thing on Google, do I list myself as a SAB or a chain? I would rather be listed as a chain since it seems easier on many accounts but I don't want to "game" the system in anyway.