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I recently watched a webmaster video that said that town focused landing pages are seen as doorway pages if they only exist to capture search traffic. And then I read that just because you can sell your product/service in a certain area, doesn't mean you can have a page for it on your website.

Is it possible to create town focused landing pages for a website without breaking Google guidelines?

Thank you. The site has approx 40 sitemaps (one for each main category). They were submitted by myself a little over a year ago, so I'm not convinced it could be related to this? As a sidenote, when i did submit the sitemaps, there was no difference whatsover in crawl rate/pages indexed, which left me feeling a little disappointed!

I have spent the last year removing pages that didn't need to exist (down from 1.5 mill to 110,000). The site has been cleaned up a lot! But nothing substantial recently.

I should also now add that since 9/18 it has gone back down to a more "normal" crawl rate of approx 1500 per day.

I have no idea what caused it! Thanks for your help and advice though, all appreciated!

Thank you Thomas.

Thank you Vijay, your response is very helpful. Do you know if there are any guidelines for optimal crawl rates? I tend to look at average pages crawled per day and multiply by 90. If that number is equal to or more than the amount of pages on-site, then we'd be good, right? Or is there a flaw in that logic?

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for responding. Yes, kind of. There are 40 main categories and each of those has upto 100 links to sub categories, and then the same again for sub-sub categories.

I've spent the last year cleaning it up and removing pages that didnt need to be there. Quite a lot of pages! In order to help Google find and index the important ones.

I will run it through Screaming Frog now, just to be sure!

Hi Mozzers,

I have a website with approx 110,000 pages. According to search console, Google will usually crawl, on average, anywhere between 500 - 1500 pages per day. However, lately the crawl rate seems to have increased rather drastically:

9/5/16 - 923
9/6/16 - 946
9/7/16 - 848
9/8/16 - 11072
9/9/16 - 50923
9/10/16 - 60389
9/11/16 - 17170
9/12/16 - 79809

I was wondering if anyone could offer any insight into why may be happening and if I should be concerned?
Thanks in advance for all advice.

Hi Mozzers,

I have a website with approx 110,000 pages. According to search console, Google will usually crawl, on average, anywhere between 500 - 1500 pages per day. However, lately the crawl rate seems to have increased rather drastically:

9/5/16 - 923
9/6/16 - 946
9/7/16 - 848
9/8/16 - 11072
9/9/16 - 50923
9/10/16 - 60389
9/11/16 - 17170
9/12/16 - 79809

I was wondering if anyone could offer any insight into why may be happening and if I should be concerned?
Thanks in advance for all advice.

Just what we were looking for. Thank you very much Lynn!

Hi Mozzers,

Really unsure if we are missing something here, but whilst trying to set-up paid ads for some of our clients on FB we have run into a significant issue.

We need to be able to allow FB to debit multiple business accounts for varying ads on different pages. However every time we try to access the ads manager to set-up a new ad, FB takes us to the individuals (the person logged in to the page) account, rather than creating an ad account for that page/business individually. What are we missing?

We use Google MCC for managing our PPC campaigns and so wondered if there is anything similar we can use for FB? Or any other recommendations on how to get round this without dragging each client into the office and asking them to log-in so that we can set these up?

Thanks!

I'd recommend checking out Crowdire (https://www.crowdfireapp.com/).

You can sign in using Twitter immediately, and sort users you follow by those not following you back, those who have unfollowed you, those who haven't been online for a specified duration of time etc. You can unfollow people directly from the site through these lists.

Some features, taken from their website:

• Finding inactive users and your unfollowers - unfollow them if you wish to
• Finding relevant users to follow using our insightful “Copy Followers” feature
• Keeping track of how your social media updates affect your follower/unfollower stats
• Checking the relationship between any two Twitter/Instagram accounts and doing a whole lot more.

Unfortunately, without knowing the types of products you sell, what you've done so far, site structure of categories and subcategories, etc, it's difficult to say what direction to go in for a "quick win".

It might be that there's no "quick win"

In the old days it was all about the PR of the linking site. But now I'd say, stop worrying about PR of the sites that you are seeking links from, and concern yourself more with relevance.

If I have the choice to get a link on a PR6 site that is in another industry or a PR2 site that is in the same, then I'd go for the second every day of the week.

I think you have got the site hierarchy down just fine. However, taking a look at [what I presume to be] your landing page, I think that you could improve your search position by providing more information on the page here.

Start with your company USP's, maybe include a short explainer video? Then work on your written content. Make your page better than your competitors page and you should be rewarded.

I have a site in a very competitive industry with a landing page that ranks within some huge business homepages, and our domain authority is about half of theirs! You just need to keep working on that page.

Dont be tempted to throw too many links at it either. Work on weeding out only the best links from your competitor profiles.

There are some great resources here:

http://bloggerspassion.com/list-of-100-plus-blogs-that-allows-guest-blogging/

You can also try searching:

• “add guest post”
• “become a contributor”
• “become a guest blogger”
• “become a guest writer”
• “become an author”
• “bloggers wanted”
• “blogs accepting guest posts”
• “blogs that accept guest bloggers”
• “blogs that accept guest posts”
• “contribute to our site”
• “contribute”
• “group writing project”
• “guest bloggers wanted”
• “guest blogging spot”
• “guest contributor”
• “guest post by”
• “guest post guidelines”
• “guest post”
• “guest posts roundup”
• “my guest posts”
• “now accepting guest posts”
• “places i guest posted”
• “submission guidelines”
• “submit a guest article”
• “submit a guest post”
• “submit guest post”
• “suggest a guest post”
• “the following guest post”
• “this guest post is from”
• “this guest post was written”
• “this is a guest article”
• “this is a guest post by”
• “want to write for”
• “write for us”
• inurl:guest-post-guidelines
• inurl:guest-posts
• inurl:write-for-us
• keyword “accepting guest posts”
• keyword “guest blogging”
• keyword “guest post by”
• keyword “guest post guidelines”
• keyword “guest post”
• keyword “guest posting”
• keyword “submit a guest post”
• keyword “submit an article”
• keyword “submit post”
• keyword “write for us”
• keyword + contribute
• keyword + guest blogging
• keyword + submit an article
• keyword + submit guest post
• keyword + submit post
• keyword + submit your post
• keyword + write for us

The above suggestions taken from this post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-advanced-guest-blogging

Good luck.

Taken from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

One thing that I think all ecommerce sites need to be adopting these days, if you haven't already, is Product schema. Even if it doesn't directly impact your rankings (which, by the sounds of it, it may in future if not a little already), it can certainly influence searchers to click on your result above others that may even rank above you.

Some reading on Product Schema, direct from the horse's mouth:
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/products

I recently watched a webmaster video that said that town focused landing pages are seen as doorway pages if they only exist to capture search traffic. And then I read that just because you can sell your product/service in a certain area, doesn't mean you can have a page for it on your website.

Is it possible to create town focused landing pages for a website without breaking Google guidelines?

I wouldnt recommend Guest Blog It to anyone personally.

My articles are often stolen and the links removed. Upon contacting admin ive received no response. I even trolled their fb page hoping to get an answer, but so far.....zip.

I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.

"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9

Seeing the usual ebay, amazon big brand domain clusters for these queries so I'd say your doing OK. You might want to consider moving your category descriptions above the fold to improve further rather than below your products on the landing page.