Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Bryan, really appreciate it!

Bryan,

Thanks for replying, and so quickly!

I'm concerned that if someone searched for "Knoxville Child Therapy", that a non-location specific Thriveworks.com/child-therapy wouldn't rank as well as a location specific page at Thriveworks.com/knoxville-counseling/child therapy (with a 'Knoxville Child Therapy' H1 tag)

Do you happen to know of any studies, principles, or examples that might help assuage my worries on this?

Moz Friends, I hope you can help with this question.

My company has 25 locations, and growing. Our rankings are strong in the Serps and Local Maps.

With each location, we create a new page (with a unique URL) for that specific location (ex: Thriveworks.com/knoxville-counseling). We then write about 15 pages of unique content for that location, each page about one of the services we provide like: Depression Counseling, Couples Therapy, Anger Management, Eating Disorder Treatment, Life Coaching, Child Therapy, and the list goes on and on....

Hence, for each location, we create a pile of URLS like: Thriveworks.com/knoxville-counseling/couples-therapy, ..../knoxville-counseling/depression-therapy, .../knoxville-counseling/anger-management...

We do this to rank for medium-long-tail searches like "Knoxville Marriage Therapy."

As we grow, this results in us writing lots and lots of original content for each location. Original, but somewhat redundant. We would much rather write one AMAZING article on depression counseling, than 25 'okay' ones for each office we open.

So, my question (if you're still reading) is our current approach the right one? Should we continue the grind and for each location create a unique page for each service offered out of that office?

Or is there a better way, where we can create One anger management page that would suffice for each of our local offices?

Has anyone addressed this topic in an article? I Haven't found one...

I look forward to your feedback, and thanks in advance!!

Good question. It's funny to hear you say "less competitive" as all searches related to "legal" and "Los Angeles" are going to be really competitive--fluctuations within the top 10 are normal, and are going to happen. I did a search for those keywords and it seems that your site shows up twice--once in the middle of the local pack, and again in the serps. Your drop in rankings could simply be because so many local listings are showing right now (7 by my search) pushing the serps down the page.

I'm noticing that you don't have any reviews for your local listing, while your competition has 22, 37, 22, and 35 reviews respectively, and are getting the much-coveted "5 stars" next to their local listing. I'd focus on getting some good reviews, as that will help with conversions.

Also, the hummingbird update really changed the chess board on long tail search, which will also effect rankings. The days of creating separate pages for "Los Angeles criminal defense attorney" and "Los Angeles Criminal Defense Lawyer" are over. Google is rewarding high quality sites optimized for the general category, and preferring them for all types of long-tail searches. --Hope this helps!

CRO,

Clarity is happening now! When you say blog-feed, you're referring to original blogs actually on the site. NOT a blog-feed showing articles syndicated from some other site. That's a good thing, as I think those links (to your internal articles) will help your ensure those posts get indexed quickly, and might get some link juice too.

While I always think some original introductory content on the homepage is a good thing, now that I understand the blog-feed is to original articles on your actual blog, I won't worry much about where it is on the homepage. I'd simply put the original homepage content anywhere that is feels good for you and the end user.

--A

Welcome to my hell! I have 18 locations. I think it's best practice to have a location page for each location with 100% original content. And plenty of it. Yes, it seems redundant to talk about plumbing in Amherst, and plumbing in Westfield, and plumbing in...wherever. Do your best and make the content valuable original content that users will find helpful. A little local flair goes a long way with potential customers too and also makes it pretty clear you're not spinning the same article. That said, with Google Local bulk spreadsheet uploads, according to the people I've spoken with at Google, your business description can be word for word the same between locations and it won't hurt your rank in the maps/local packs one bit. Hope this helps!

A blogfeed should be okay, meaning that the site won't be penalized for having it. But the feed's not going to help SEO, either. That blog really needs you to start writing some high-quality unique content ASAP if they want the search engines to rank their site.  Also, they should put your good original content at the top, above the fold, and start making the blogfeed a feature of lesser prominence. You're going to want google to see the good/original content first --Hope this helps!

No, I don't think you're in any danger here. None at all. These links make complete sense, and you're allowed to link to whoever you want. You're not building a spammy link web, or anything close to that. All that said, just a few weeks ago Rand, in the Whiteboard Friday "Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO", addressed the question "If I have multiple websites all linking back to my main site, does that help or hurt my SEO?"

The take-home is that it probably makes the most sense for the corporate site to build brand pages at sub-directories on the main corporate site, rather than have a bunch of smaller brand sites to promote their products/services.

Hope this helps!

.

It all looks okay from here too. It looks like you could do some more link building (it looks like you have 4 sites linking to you), and definitely try and get some more Google reviews (again, you have only 4--try to get 10), and keep producing quality content for your website (3 tips on taking to your kids about getting braces...or whatever it is you do ;-).

You're in a competitive space, in a big market! You're doing well, keep it up.

Good point. I didn't even consider that Twitter links are no-follow. That almost makes it a moot point right there. Thanks Monica!

Jen,

I'm not sure if it will be bad based on research, but based on what you aim for in a URL (clarity, what the article is about, user experience, descriptive keywords, etc...) the TM Registered may not fit well.

Plus, be careful, your TM (if using symbols) will get changed to  () or  () in the URL - making it less user friendly to type in (let alone look at)..

Hope this Helps!

Eli Overbey

Iris,

You may be keyword stuffing... I haven't read through your entire site, but do be careful. One of the best sayings someone ever taught me was: "When you are doing SEO for keywords, be good at it - don't be great". It's strange, but it makes sense. Don't over do it.

Instead, consider exploring other avenues such as link building. I've noticed you only have 8 unique domains pointing to your site. The resort / hotel industry is very difficult to compete in, so consider building a better link profile.

Besides the keywords, there could be other reasons you are not ranking.

Eli

Mozzers,

Here we go. I've read multiple posts for years on taxonomy dupe content. In fact, I've read 10 articles tonight on taxonomies and categories.

A little background: I am using Wordpress SEO with the Yoast plugin.

**Here is the scenario: We have 560 tags - some make sense - some do not. **

What do I do?

• Do I not worry about it?

• Matt Cutts said twice that I should not stress about it, because in the worse non-spammy case, Google may just ignore the duplicate content. Matt said in the video, “I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing.” (Found Via Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459).

• Do I NoIndex,Follow the Tags?

• Yoast and a Moz post both say I should NoIndex and Follow the Tags. From the post: "Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed." BUT! **The tags have been indexed for YEARS! And both articles go onto say **"if your blog has already existed for some time, and you've been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn't just go deindexing them" (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success).

• So do I deindex tags that have been indexed for years? I checked the analytics, and in the past month, tags have brought in less than 1% of traffic, but they are bringing in traffic.

• Do I canonicalize the tags?

• Canonicalize the URL from "http://domain.com/blog/tag/addiction/" to "http://domain.com/blog/" ? And if I canonicalize, would you canonicalize to the /blog or to the base /tag?

Thanks for any and all help. I just want to clarify this issue. One of the reasons is because I received a Moz Report with a TON of dupe content warning from the tags and categories.

Good question. It's funny to hear you say "less competitive" as all searches related to "legal" and "Los Angeles" are going to be really competitive--fluctuations within the top 10 are normal, and are going to happen. I did a search for those keywords and it seems that your site shows up twice--once in the middle of the local pack, and again in the serps. Your drop in rankings could simply be because so many local listings are showing right now (7 by my search) pushing the serps down the page.

I'm noticing that you don't have any reviews for your local listing, while your competition has 22, 37, 22, and 35 reviews respectively, and are getting the much-coveted "5 stars" next to their local listing. I'd focus on getting some good reviews, as that will help with conversions.

Also, the hummingbird update really changed the chess board on long tail search, which will also effect rankings. The days of creating separate pages for "Los Angeles criminal defense attorney" and "Los Angeles Criminal Defense Lawyer" are over. Google is rewarding high quality sites optimized for the general category, and preferring them for all types of long-tail searches. --Hope this helps!

Welcome to my hell! I have 18 locations. I think it's best practice to have a location page for each location with 100% original content. And plenty of it. Yes, it seems redundant to talk about plumbing in Amherst, and plumbing in Westfield, and plumbing in...wherever. Do your best and make the content valuable original content that users will find helpful. A little local flair goes a long way with potential customers too and also makes it pretty clear you're not spinning the same article. That said, with Google Local bulk spreadsheet uploads, according to the people I've spoken with at Google, your business description can be word for word the same between locations and it won't hurt your rank in the maps/local packs one bit. Hope this helps!

Hi Everyone,

I got this question answered by google and thought I'd share.

Hello Anthony, Thank you for the clarification, You have creative control of the information displayed. The bulk spreadsheet allows you to enter in a blanket description. However on a personal note I prefer custom when I read a page, (and it does no harm to customize) to me it makes it feel more "friendly". Customizing a description should have no effect on ranking, any changes can take a day or 2 to be seen. In that time the page may act strange, but it should be back to normal within the week. Ultimately the choice to personalize or use a standard description is up to you. Here it will have no effect on verification or ranking. To be concise, I suppose the answers are as follows: 1) Should I copy and paste each location's current unique description into the spreadsheet, or just write one very good description and copy it for all 20 locations?This is 100% your personal preference.   2) Does Google like/dislike "duplicate content" as it applies to business descriptions?  Google does not care.3) Is changing a location's description likely to temporarily harm the "ranking" of my business location in search results?No. It has no effect.  Hope this helps!

About a year (or 2) ago, Matt Cutts said that Twitter and FB have no effect on website rank, in part because Google can't get to the content.

Now that Google will be indexing Twitter (again), do we expect that links in twitter posts will be useful backlinks for improving SERP rank?

Jake,

I completely agree with Peter. We used to buy keyword domains all the time - and it worked well - until about 6 months ago. We own counseling practices, so we bought many [city]+counseling.com domains for really cheap.

A year ago, those ranked on Google in top 5 spots within 2 months of purchasing and building out the site. Now, you cannot find those keyword domains anywhere, unless, like Peter said, they already had domain authority. The domains we had been working on for years are still fine, but starting with a new keyword domain now is like starting with just an ordinary domain.

Eli

The algorithm tries to predict what the rest of your query might be based on popular queries typed by other users. (credit to: Google Support)

Thanks Ryan, that makes sense. It will be interesting to see if Twitter links follow suit. Haven't seen any tweets (at all) come up in the serps yet. Waiting for it!