Sorry for my ignorance here but does googl.in not show the local pack in its serps, with reviews and ratings?

if so, isn't the business model flawed, assuming you're going to be charging companies to be listed in your directory when they can get listed as a local business in Google right now for free?

perhaps I've overlooked something...

I would suggest using rel canonical tag, as this is what it was intended for:

Could it be because Deep Crawl hammered the site and the server couldn't handle the load or something?

Correct.

The server reached its max resource limit. Try to set a longer delay on requests, if this is a setting in deepcrawl.co.uk?

I'm sending you a link of the San Jose location - http://5starloans.com/san-jose/

I already had that link in your original post, what do you think is wrong with this page?

Yes, I think adding a unit number would help a lot, as "900 S Winchester Blvd, San Jose" is currently just a building with multiple businesses in.

Then, unfortunately, you have a bit of leg work to do in updating all your citations such as Yelp.

Don't forget local listings are all based on getting that golden NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) spot on! Even a misplaced comma can result in it not counting as a valid citation.

This said, I would also check mentions on your site as I noticed http://5starloans.com/san-jose/ had slight variation in address detail:

Above map I see this:
900 S. Winchester Blvd San Jose, California 95128

In footer I see this:
900 S. Winchester Blvd ,San Jose

Use Name, address (specified EXACTLY THE SAME EVERYWHERE), then phone number, e.g. 
5 Star Loans, 900 S. Winchester Blvd, San Jose, California, 95128, (408) 260 9971

Also use local business schema markup for this, as you've already done in the footer.

Hey

A couple of resources for you:

https://moz.com/ugc/link-tilte-attribute-and-its-seo-benefit
https://moz.com/community/q/does-the-link-title-attribute-benefit-seo-2

Short answer, no it's not worth the effort from an SEO point of view.

Hey

I am guessing Berkeley was your first location (and perhaps your main office address?) and San Jose is a virtual address?

The only reason for making this assumption is if you Google your address for each location the results are very different:

"1172 San Pablo Ave, Unit 102, Berkeley" - returns just 35 results, all of which are your business.
"900 S Winchester Blvd, San Jose" - returns over 1,100 results. Many are not your business.

This is often a problem when multiple businesses operate from a virtual office address.

Hope this was helpful?

Google doesn’t like duplicate content in any form, including title tags. Multiple pages on your website have the very similar title tags, so Google may elect to change one or more of them in order to provide a unique description for each one.

You could try changing the making the title tags a little more unique, or swap your logo for an image instead of text, since this is where Google is pulling the "The Law Office of Daniel L. DuRee." text from.

Alternatively, this could be Google being clever and trying to push your brand (Daniel L. DuRee), as it thinks it's more useful to the searcher than the current title tag?

Linked reports, which you pin to dashboards, can’t have metric filters or secondary dimensions (which is what you're after).

See limitations here - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6099989?hl=en

You can create the widget you're looking for using my example above, but it does require a drill-down, so will not be able to display on the dashboard.

I understand, but this is not really a limitation of GA but the nature of dashboards in general.They're not meant to be drilled down into, they're there as one-glance snapshots.

In GA dashboards, you can of course click the widget title on the dash, which takes you through to the actual table which then allows you to click the source dimension and see the page by avg. time on page.

Hey,

I think this is how you want to set it up - http://gyazo.com/30d080d53fda667a388beac516766f74

Then select 'Converters' as the Segment - http://gyazo.com/a77ef5f1814f7177717b805023bd28d7

Hope that's what you wanted?

Hi

If you find our products cheaper elsewhere then please click below to get your price match

This would generally be better suited to an image (nice promotional graphic) anyway.

The other parts (contact/delivery etc) could be included in an iFrame instead of an image. Either would reduce dupe content.

I'd suggest getting reviews/FAQs etc on the product pages as these will create more unique content.

Lastly, this is a great resource - https://blog.amasty.com/an-extensive-guide-on-magento-duplicate-content/

Hi

Should I purchase localized urls like .co.uk or .com.au and point those at my .com?

This will not help you.

What are you giving Google to help them understand that your website is also for a UK audience? You need to provide flags for Google to understand or it will look at the major factors, e.g.:

• Name, Address, Phone number on your .com domain (are these US, or do you also list a UK address)
• Citations of these details ^ (are they cited on US based websites/directories)
• Server location (is site hosted in US)
• Domain registration details (US address)
• Inbound links (you mentioned 75% US, need more UK focussed + UK PR)

It's hard to give advice when I don't understand your business, but if possible, could you create localised versions of each page? i.e. www.domain.com (original) and www.domain.com/uk/ and www.domain.com/au/ (simple enough if site is built on Wordpress with the WP ML plugin).

This way your www.domain.com/contact/ would remain 'as is' but www.domain.com/uk/contact/ as an example would contain your UK address, UK phone number etc (don't forget you can buy postal addresses in most major cities around the world for ~£30/month).

You'd then build all your external UK links to your www.domain.com/uk/ pages.

One thing to beware of, this approach would only work if you could truly rewrite every page with unique content, which is much harder when it's EN-US to EN-GB or EN-US to EN-AU etc.

Do not copy the content from www.domain.com/product1 to www.domain.com/uk/product1 and think that changing the Americanized spellings to English will work for you. It won't! And you will risk a duplicate content penalty.

This is a good exercise, if done correctly as you'd be surprised how keywords change per country, especially long-tail phrases, even between English speaking countries.

Take vehicle rental as an example - van, truck, suv, rv, ute are all variations of pretty much the same thing, used across different English speaking counties.

Then the longer tail is more complex as American's are more familier with 'Rental', whereas English more commonly use 'Hire'. So if you're targeting one phrase only on domain.com and that phrase is suv rental, the guys looking for ute hire in Australia will never find you.

Oh -- You'd also need to implement href lang tags into your meta head to tell Google which version is for which Country.

Hope this helps.

Are you using a unique GA Tracking ID per domain - It's the UA- number?

Hello,

While I can't confirm this, my understanding was that you can't have a penalty on http and not on https (and vice versa). The domain or sub-domain is where the penalty would be (to my understanding - could be wrong?).

Although Google sees http://www.domain.com/blog/ and https://www.domain.com/blog/ as two different URLs, I believe a penalty for thin content would be cast on domain.com, thus affecting both URLs.

I'd suggest moving all pages to https and ensure your blog content is not thin.  If you're struggling for time to create great blog content, cut down on your volume and post better quality less often. That'd be the safest strategy IMO.

Goodluck!

Yes. That's a standard H1 tag.

Hi

can you share an example of where you are seeing the H style tag? Sounds to me like it's a standard inline CSS style attribute on a H tag but I could be wrong?

thanks

Agreed. Responsive all the way!

1. Less work to manage
2. Cheaper to manage
3. Better SEO strategy

Thanks for your suggestions.

Hi Monica

No messages in GWT.

There is a a possibility that when Penguin 3.0 rolled out it gave other sites with better link profiles a boost over your site. A site with a stronger link profile and better content will out rank you even if their DA is lower.

I think this is most likely combined with the Panda 4.1 rollout perhaps targeting the thin gallery pages.

The challenge we have is how to write engaging relevant/semantic content around 19 variations of the same product, when the gallery content is "brochure style" built for users, not search engines.

So from what I can see you don't have that many backlinks and the one ones you have are mostly from one website. But with a DA of 42 the inbound links seem relevant and good  quality.

Where are you seeing this data?

http://www.carismaautodesign.com has:

178 links from 37 RD's (Moz's Open Site Explorer Data)
282 links from 115 RD's (Ahrefs Data)
406 links from 88 RD's (Majestics Data)

With links from some DA 90+ domains include ft.com, telegraph.co.uk, nydailynews.com, autoexpress.co.uk to name but a few.

I don't think links is the issue here, which makes me think content perhaps is, but as far as I can see, there was no content related Google updates (which would affect this site) around the time of the drop?

Thanks,

Hi there,

Thanks for contributing.
Yes (good point made), I had checked keywords and yes they have all dropped. Some keywords more dramatic than others, see graph for example of "Volkswagen Transporter Conversion" which dropped from #20 down to #37 in google.en-UK and google.en-US.

Bing no where near so dramatic and some keywords even increased during this time.

Hi All

My client's site http://www.carismaautodesign.com took a bit of a knock around 24th October 2014. Google organic traffic down by ~32%.

I am trying to understand if site has been hit by a Penguin refresh (3.0) - and if so why?
If it was, it would appear to be a false negative as the site and backlink profile is clean.

The content is perhaps the only area in question... as it's more of a brochure site, therefore content is relatively thin and promotional rather than in-depth/editorial.

For example, the gallery pages are very similar in structure, with the images and specification text being the only variation, click on any of the vehicle interiors to see what I mean - http://www.carismaautodesign.com/gallery/mercedes/viano/

You will see the specification text is unique per vehicle interior, but not hugely; Then how could it be? The interiors all contain the same elements just a variation in seating, leather colour, stiching, wood finish etc.

Question: Do you think...

a.) This IS NOT a Penguin issue but something else (please ellaborate)
b.) This IS a Penguin issue but a false-negative, so do nothing, this will bounce back with next Penguin refresh
c.) This IS a Penguin issue related to content. Merge all gallery pages into one page per vehicle (i.e. one Mercedes Viano Interior page, with all 19 interior galleries as part of the page - thus building one stronger page with more intro text and simple bulleted specification per gallery)
d.) This IS a Penguin issue related to something else (please ellaborate)

Thanks,

Hey David

Thanks for reply.

3. Use a plugin to apply rich snippet markup to the individual product pages, adding another layer of "uniqueness"

I had thought about this already and was looking into the MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) attribute for products (https://schema.org/mpn) however, it's not clear if, like SKU, the MPN needs to be unique to ProductModel (https://schema.org/ProductModel)?

If that were the case, I'd have a problem as there are multiple MPN's per ProductModel.

I see https://schema.org/isVariantOf too, which could be useful?

Anyone with experience of Schema?

The pages were not intended strictly for SEO value, they were mainly built for user value, i.e. returning a 100% focused page on the part number they searched for. Remember, many people use Google as a navigational tool and they also consider the product to the the part no. they searched for, not the main manufacturer of the product (ATE).

I understand what you are saying though and think building stronger product pages is the way to go, although I will try on a subset of pages and monitor results.

Now to decide which approach to take to yield the best results:

a.) SEO focus on ATE MK70 (list all the vehicle makes/models/years this product work on, including list of part numbers)
or...
b.) SEO focus on vehicle makes/model (then list all the manufacturers of suitable products, with corresponding part numbers)

Thanks,
Woody

Thanks guys

William

What's the thought process of creating a bunch of new pages, even though it's the same product, just referred to differently by different companies? Just for the unique URLs and titles?

Samuel

Would you want to create a separate page for "red Honda Civic," "green Honda civic," and countless other colors? Of course not.

To hopefully address both questions with one answer; the reason for building separate pages was to give SEO focus to the unique part numbers and the product type by vehicle make / model / year.

Very few people in the industry search for the product by name, it's always by part number. In fact, I'd go as far as to say there's few who would actually know the brand of "the product", that being ATE MK70 in our example above.

I understand the logic of building a strong single product page with all these part numbers listed, but would this page really rank well for searches on part number? Bear in mind, unlike the red, green, blue Honda Civic example, where there's perhaps a dozen different colours, we're talking literally 100's of part numbers per product and variations of it's formatting.

I welcome further conversation and ideas on this
Thanks so far guys!

Thank you for your answer William and taking the time to respond,

I understand what you are saying but I am a little skeptical as that being a logical/achievable solution?

Let's say we did write some content for each product, the content would be "thin" to say the least.

As an example, we have over 700 products (per language), this being on of them - http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/product/ate-mk70

This product alone works in over 43 different vehicle marques, illustrated in the list of on the page.

The only thing different about them is the part number, i.e. what the manufacturer refers to this part as (Audi A3 refer to it as 10097003153, Peugeot 206 refer to it as 9659136980). There really is nothing more to say about the product, without creating more dupe content and getting into Panda territory, so I don't see this being a viable solution?

We have the pages in place as mechanics/garages search by manufactures number, not product type.

Any more thoughts/ideas?

Hi all,

My site is www.actronics.eu

Moz reports virtually every product page as duplicate content, flagged as HIGH PRIORITY!.

I know why.

Moz classes a page as duplicate if >95% content/code similar.

There's very little I can do about this as although our products are different, the content is very similar, albeit a few part numbers and vehicle make/model.

Here's an example:
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/audi-a4-8d-b5-1994-2000-abs-ecu-en/bosch-5-3
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/bmw-3-series-e36-1990-1998-abs-ecu-en/ate-34-51

Now, multiply this by ~2,000 products X 7 different languages and you'll see we have a big dupe content issue (according to Moz's Crawl Diagnostics report).

I say "according to Moz..." as I do not know if this is actually an issue for Google? 90% of our products pages rank, albeit some much better than others?

So what is the solution? We're not trying to deceive Google in any way so it would seem unfair to be hit with a dupe content penalty, this is a legit dilemma where our product differ by as little as a part number.

One ugly solution would be to remove header / sidebar / footer on our product pages as I've demonstrated here - http://woodberry.me.uk/test-page2-minimal-v2.html since this removes A LOT of page bloat (code) and would bring the page difference down to 80% duplicate.
(This is the tool I'm using for checking http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php)

Other "prettier" solutions would greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks,
Woody

I wouldn't do a no follow however

I agree. My solution was to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW.

Hey Prestashop

To add a little more clarity - would you:

a.) add /search/ to robots.txt, like so:
Disallow: /search/

or

b.) add noindex/nofollow at page level: like so:
in the search results page template.

I would opt for option b, but it would be interested to hear your thoughts too and why.

Thanks,

Agreed. This won't result in a penalty.

To add; as most privacy policies are linked from the footer, so you might want to add a rel="nofollow" to the link.

Hi Vadim,

Sorry for late reply .

Thanks for your response. That's great news and assuming %%ParentCategory%% can be used in the same way, I am able to do what I need, or as they say here in England, I am Home and Dry!!

Thanks,
Woody

Thanks Vadim

Can you expand on this further?

Does this allow you to add category tags to meta title, like %%Category%%, which would display Category in selected language?

Thanks,
Woody

hi,
I am using WooCommerce with WPML and would like to be able to create dynamic title and description meta tags for product pages using variables like product name, category name, parent category, product types etc.

Something like this for meta titles:

%%ProductName%% | %%ParentCategory%% > %%ChildCategory%% | %%SiteName%%

And something like this for meta descriptions:

Buy our %%ProductName%% today, the best %%ParentCategory%% available online only at %%SiteName%%

Obviously ProductName, ParentCategory etc would all output the correct value for selected language.

Is this achievable with Yoast's SEO plugin? If not, any other recommendations on plugins?

Thanks,

Woody

Hi Linda,

Thanks for sharing this.

At £450.00 just for the PDF report on SEO in Middle East, I think I'll chance my luck and find someone on oDesk who can do the job for less than the cost of the report

Although I'm sure the report would be extremely well written and very useful.

Cheers.
Woody

Hi All,

Can anyone recommend good SEOs who specialise in Arabic?

I've had my client's website translated into Arabic but the translation company do not specialise in local keyword research. They've translated literally I think (obviously not being an Arabic speaker, I can't confirm this).

I need someone to review the translated site (only 4 pages so far), with a marketing head on, and ensure it includes the relevant local keywords used in UAE countries.

Will also require deeper keyword research for a Google.ae PPC campaign and Ad copy written in Arabic.

If I fail to find someone here in the moz community I'll head over to oDesk, where I'll find everyone and their mother-in-law proclaiming to be the worlds best Arabic SEO
I like recommendations!

Thanks,

Woody

Hey Purple Indigo,

Sounds to me like you are one of the few thought leaders in your niche which is why you're struggling to find others, and perhaps "others" are "competitors", where your not going to get a mention/link from in a million years.

If you're still struggling with this, my suggestion would be slightly different and approach thought leaders of CLOSELY RELATED niches, and introduce yourself as the thought leader in your niche. You'll need to put a spin on the introduction and how phone unlocking is linked to their niche.

Think niches like...

gadgets/tech
mobile/app developers
PC repairs/over-clockers etc
Money saving tips

I'm sure you could find some middle ground with thought leaders in these niches? You just need to get creative and be prepared to share their content first.

Hope this helps

Woody

Yep, that's a useful post, thanks

I was planning to continue building US links anyway but just wondered if there was anything else, any fellow SEO's, in the same position, found to work well?

Cheers

Hi CleverPhD

Thanks for taking the time to answer, and I'll certainly look into Earth Class Mail

Perhaps I've mislead you or you have interpreted my questions incorrectly, but there's not two domains, just one.

companyname.com

It's an international business, with HQ located in the UK. Unfortunately it's only physical location is in the UK but it's products are available internationally. You order from through the website, the product is built in the UK and then exported to the US (or any other country).

If I set the Geographic Target to US in GWT wont we lose rankings in google.co.uk? Which is by far our biggest market, (only because we rank so well in google.co.uk), the potential is in the US.

Just seems strange that the en-us keywords are identical to en-gb keywords, so why are we so far behind on google.com?

Any other ideas?

Cheers
Woody

Hi all,

I have a UK client with a .com domain, hosted on a US server, but the physical business premises is based in the UK. Their product is a really great product and available for export to the US.

I want to rank them higher in the US, more specifically Google.com.

I've helped them rank very well organically in the UK (google.co.uk) for some great terms, however they rank almost nowhere in google.com (gl=us) for the same terms, for example:

In Google.co.uk they rank #3 for the key-phrase.
In Google.com they rank #90 for the same key-phrase.

I've got them some great US focused links with PR coverage including MSN Cars, nydailynews.com etc.

I just wondered if there was any one "golden ticket" for boosting US rankings? I've read that a physical business premises located in the US helps a lot. Can anyone confirm this and if so, would a rented PO box in the US help?

The site has great social signals too, growing twitter following and many FB likes/shares etc.

Any other tips/advice?

Thanks in advance,
Cheers,
Woody

Thanks EGOL,

So you'd definitely recommend a long article for ranking my secondary key phrases even though the page will not be optimised for them, like it would on their own page?

I think that depends on the sector you're in. There are specialist PR companies per sector who will most likely do a better job for you than a general PR company.

For example, I use http://www.newspress.co.uk/ as I have a couple of clients in the automotive sector.

Hey Ash, Welcome to Moz.

Firstly "a campaign" is what you setup to monitor your website's SEO performance. Think of a campaign as like "a project".

"The app" is simply the application/interface where you see all the data pertaining to "the campaign".

If you've not yet setup your first campaign, please go to http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/new and follow the steps.

Once you have a campaign setup go to http://moz.com/pro/home to access it within the app.

Hope that helps,

Woody

Hey,

So I think the title of my question says it all really. I've written an article which is now 3k words.

Should I :

a.) publish as one article and reap the benefits of a very authoritative page on the subject, social shares, etc, but secondary keywords will be formatted as sub-headings (H2 tags) within the article.

or,

b.) break article down into 3 logical steps, resulting in 4 pages (intro, part 1, part 2, part 3) and reap the benefits of 3 highly optimized pages where secondary keywords become primary keywords (URL, Meta Title, H1, etc)

Thoughts welcome?

Cheers,
Woody

I would say definitely not. Happy to be challenged on that though

Especially now it appears search engines are devaluing the power of EMDs over brands.

I guess it would help to randomise the featured products and the customer reviews, but I honestly think your biggest problem is this repeated block of text under the featured products where you're dynamically swapping out one or two words with your keyword, for example:

2011 Duraflex Audi A7 body kits are custom exterior accessories that can be installed to upgrade and revitalize a car’s {exterior look. After years of usage, the exterior parts on many automobiles starts to look outdated. Any damage to a car’s paint job or to the exterior components themselves can depreciate a automobile's value, making the use of body kit is just that important. A aerodynamic kits can transform a car look better, without ever changing any of the true mechanics of the vehicle.

Get rid of this and see if you're pages regain their previous positions in the SERPs.

Hope that helps,

Woody

Thanks Tom,

I like the idea of anchoring links down to specific OE number sections using the H2 headings, my concern is what content would these sections contain?

You mention a brief description and history. The problem is there's nothing different about the product so the description/history would be exactly the same as the main product number. These number are literally alternative numbers for EXACTLY the same product.

Client did have option 1 set up and working when I came onboard and they did rank well for these OE numbers which brought in visitors/business. These pages had nothing more than a H1 Heading and one line of text on these pages containing OE number. I advised client to 301 these into main product page which also listed these OE number as alternate numbers.

In the short term I suspect this move will lose them visitors, until we build strength into main product page and in the long term protect their domain from a Panda penalty for thin content.

Would you agree?

Hi All,

What's the best way to optimise pages for OE / Manufacturer Part numbers?

Disclaimer: All part numbers in this post are fictional. I dont want this post out ranking my client for real part numbers

Take this for Throttle Body for example:

WOODYS S-AB-Q.123.53G

This is the main part number from WOODYS (the manufacturer).

However, these are all variations of exactly the same product:

• Woodys 2.78972.11.0
• Woodys 2.78972.16.0
• Woodys 2.78972.20.0
• Woodys 2.78972.26.0

Oh, and car brands use OE numbers for these parts, such as:

• VWA 9808e40923G

• VWA 9808e40923L

• VWA 9808e40923M

• VWA 9808e40923P

• VWA 9808e40923Q

  These internal part numbers are vitally important as most of my clients customers are garages/mechanics so they're very likely to search on OE numbers.

So, would you suggest:

1. Optimising 10 different pages for the same product (using the part numbers in the URL, Title and H1). The problem is there's no unique content for these pages, only the part number varies, so this would likely get penalised for dupe content, or not enough unique content.

2. Optimising one page for all terms. If so, how do you suggest doing this to ensure all part/OE numbers rank well and part numbers are prominent in the SERPS?
   Could Schema.org help here by marking up these EO numbers with the isSimilarTo property of the Product type? I'm trying to ensure these part number get equal presence in the SERP snippet when searched for, even though I can't physically include all these numbers in the Title tag, URL and H1 of one page.

3. Something else?

Thanks,

Woody