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What advice can Rand give with regards to doing SEO for small to mid-size, not necessarily online, businesses?  What is the most efficient use of time?

I am thinking of small service or brick & mortar businesses.  In these businesses the owner/manager is also the one who is doing the SEO, so time is at a premium.  This is my scenario, and I know it is the same for a lot of people.   I know that SEO is work, and it takes time.  But since time is limited, what things would Rand consider " 100% necessary"  and what things would he consider "nice to have".

Thanks!

GWT sometimes takes a while to register the change.  It just actually happened on one of my clients pages where there was a bug in the code made by the developer and they got 30,000 duplicate title and description errors.  It was fixed about 2 months ago and while the errors have dropped to 2000 or so, it is still not at zero yet, so it does take some time depending on how often Google crawls the site.

If the developer says they did it, I would recommend the first thing you do is simply check that they did it.  Go to one of the pages in question, both one with capital and without, and do a view source on both to check that the rel="canonical" tag is there and is correct.  Programmers don't always know much about SEO so they may be implementing them wrong.

Or you can link back to the original article with a rel="cannonical" or if you want to be 100% sure just make it rel="nofollow".

As a simpler solution, why don't you just add a rel="canonical" tag to each page specifying the one you want?  That should take care of any duplicate content issues.

I hope this helps.

I will just add my 2 cents.  Based on the changes I saw in my websites  it seems like it is based on the page, not the site.  While some pages have disappeared from the rankings, others seem to be unaffected.  Ray.

Thanks for the notice.  I checked my main sites and noticed that 10 of the sites went up, but the problem child - the one who was hit hardest by Penguin 1.0 - got moved down from page 2 to page 4.  I am not sure why they are singling out that site since it what I did there was almost identical (as far as the link building is concerned) to the other 10.

Good luck to everybody else.

Not sure if it will help, but if your business has a physical address you can try registering it with google places (and other well known online business directories).  This can take time as they mail verification to your address, but it would be worth it.

You may also try to get your name trademarked in the country you are in.  That would help give you business more legitimacy in the eyes of google.

And finally try to get some of your back links to be labeled with the full business name, so something like 'trophy centrall LLC' or whatever applies to you.   That may also help.

Good luck.

Hi,
   Over the past few days, I have noticed that a few of my pages that were hit by the Google Penguin update come back from the dead and return to the #1 spot for the main keywords.  I still don't see any change for secondary keywords I used to rank for, but hey at least there is something.

Has anybody else noticed this?

NOTE:  I did not make any changes to my pages.  I had never done any black-hat (just greyish) so I took the advice of many and just waited.

Hi Dr. Pete,

That brings up an interesting possibility.

< start conspiracy theory>

Is it possible that Google is actually going through this summer of volatility to weed out the people who are not following their policy.  By this I mean that every time they make a change, anybody who is doing even the slightest "grey hat" SEO runs to their site and gets rid of it if they can.  I am guessing that with just this uncertainty alone google forcing people to clean their own sites.

People who are sure their sites are clean, there is nothing they can do even if they want to, so Google may figure that after this turbulence they can just eliminate this turbulence, run the previous algorithm from before the summer (or at least a more stable one than now) and the good sites will automatically float to the top since most sites will be "clean" again thanks to all the webmasters cleaning house all summer.

I am not a conspiracy theorists, nor do I play one on TV.  

Good morning,

As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning.  So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https?  Even simple information pages and blog posts?  Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it?

Anybody know?  Thanks in advance.

I agree that you should not do anything as obvious as a link wheel, especially with the recent google updates and penalties.

That being said, I have a number of sites in same server that link to each other.  This was not  done with the intention of creating a link wheel.  I simply went the microsite route instead of a main large site.  I did, and still do seem to be getting benefit from them linking to each other.  Of course, each site has its own links from different places linking to it, so the inter-linking between my sites is a very very small portion of my total inbound links.

I am however working on merging the sites right now since I am worried google may frown upon this kind of thing in the future.  But for now - and the past - it seemed to have helped.

Just my 2 pesos opinion/experience.  I hope this helps.

Canadian client with a suite number in a shopping center.

Does it matter if the NAP is the way it's displayed on Google Maps? Canada Post (or in the US, USPS)?

Or does it only matter that all the citations are as similar as possible to one another?

Canada Post says:

400-3033 IMMEL ST
ABBOTSFORD BC  V2S 6S2

But if I look that up on maps.google.com, it defaults to:

3033 Immel St Abbotsford, BC V2S 4L3, CanadaAnd the client does not appear in the list of about 20+ businesses at this address.Which should I use for Places (and I assume any other citation)?

This is not a scientific answer and I am sure somebody can give you a more detailed answer, but anecdotally I still do it on all my websites as a best practice.   I can't say I have noted a huge benefit, but it also does not hurt and helps normalize things.

I hope this helps.

You don't necessarily need to pay SEO salary for your outreach effort.  I have a VA in the Philippines that does this for me.  I gave them the outreach template and guidelines for who to reach out to, and they take care of it.  If/when they get a response they forward it to me and I take if from there.  This has worked pretty well for me - not just for SEO but for building business relationships - and is a lot more cost effective for small businesses like mine than hire an SEO company.

I hope this helps.

If you are very worried, I would say just make them nofollow.  The benefit you would get from them might not be worth the worry.

But, since you control the sites yourself, I don't see any reason why you can't experiment.  Put a few of the links to your other site, in context, and make them do follow.  Wait a few weeks and see what happens.  Did your other site benefit.  In that case, I would keep them. If your other site goes down, or sees no benefit, then I would then make them no follow.   These links should have little risk of getting you banned from google - unless you have thousands of these - and it has a small chance of doing some good.

Again, I will put the caveat to say that this is what I would do.  I have been doing seo for about 4 years as part of my businesses, but I am not a full time SEO don't claim to be an expert.

I also have had to deal with this in my sites.  In most cases, I actually go with the norm that the language is based in.  By this I mean that if the page is in English, even if I am using a Spanish or French word, I tend not to use the accent.  This is primarily because based on my statistics - I have been doing multi-language SEO for my sites for over 5 years - most people do not have their keyboards configured to make accents.
   So, if somebody was looking for information on:

Mexico

It is much much more likely that they would put that in google instead of:

México

Most non-tech people would struggle to figure out how to put an é, ñ or a ö on U.S. keyboards.

Of course there are some places on your site that you need to put the accents, especially if it is something like language education where they expect it to be with an accent, but otherwise I do not put them.  Of course, if you have your entire page translated into Spanish or French, then put the accents in the correct places because there they will be expected and the searchers will probably look using accents.  As you probably know, an accent in Spanish, French, etc can change the entire meaning of a word.

I hope this helps.

P.S. Hola desde Querétaro.

Hi BobGW,
   I actually have experience in doing exactly this for one of my sites.  I created a free academic archive - in the same niche as my site - as link bait.  My results were mixed.

I got quite a few new links coming back to the resource, and still do.  The problem has been so far that the links are generally from low DA pages like blogs.  There are exceptions as I did get a .mil and a few .edu links from it as well.  Now, the traffic to the site definitely went up due to the new section as did social engagement.  So, just for this it may be said that it was worth it.

But despite all of this, I have not seen any major changes in SERP (up or down) in the last 6 months since this section was released.  It just seems like the "link juice" is not transferring in any meaningful way despite a pretty simply site structure.  I have also not seen any marked increase in conversions on the site.  So, while Google does not seem to be punishing the site for this section, it also does not seem to be giving it credit for this either (even though it ranks well for its own keyword).

In the end, it is as Andrew said, it depends on how much   time and money this section will cost you.  Based on the current success of this section on my site I would still say the 2 months to create it were worth it.  I just hope that the SERP benefits will propagate to the rest of the site in the long term

Good luck.