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Thanks for putting this one out there. This would probably make for a pretty interesting case study. You might as well track it.

They aren't doing anything that would help a flash site work with on-page. Though there is a title attribute for Power Lead Generation.

Search Operators are your friend. site:ctrl-alt-success.com intext:MULTITASKING IS BAD FOR YOU, MKAY

The Googles have found you just fine. Just remember, site:anything.com. It appears that your GA tag does look a little weird, but it seems to be firing just fine.

Unfortunately there aren't many instances of plug and play Schema markup. If reviews and recipes are your thing, there are a few WordPress plugins that may make your life easier.

But for the most part you have to understand that there are scopes, types and properties. Here's a link - scroll down beyond the More Specific types. Click the Microdata tag under Examples.

It's basically zooming in from a broad type. It's saying I'm a WebPage. Then it's saying I'm a WebPage and I have breadcrumb navigation. This particular breadcrumb pertains to books.

Okay, so this is a Webpage about Books... maybe. Let's get a little more specific. This is definitely about a book. Here's the cover image. The book is Catcher in The Rye.

Yeah? But what type of book? There are several kinds.

Well, this one is a paper back.

Oh. But who wrote it?

J.D. Salinger.

I've heard of that guy. What did people think about the book?

All of the ratings average 4 stars.

Oh yeah? How many ratings, weisenheimer?

3077, natch.

How much is it and can I get it now?

Fo sho, it's $6.99 and it's in stock.

I need to know a little more about it. I don't have a lot of free time.

No problem, it's 224 pages and written in English.

Is this a first printing?

Naw man, it was printed in May 1, 1991. Here's the ISBN number so you can check it out further.

So you can see that Schema can get pretty involved. It can also be pretty direct. It really depends upon what your application is. Hopefully that helps.

I was checking my referral traffic after Pigeon, just to see how much review site/local directory traffic has increased. Then I found something odd.

It's not exactly like Tlames has stopped. I've noticed that kamabasoft(dot)com has been referring a bit of traffic as of late. Both Tlames and kamba referral traffic primarily originate from Brazil. When I did a site operator on kamba, I noticed two Tlames subs on kamba. (See attached image)

I'm aware that both referrers come from more than one country, but Brazil makes up the bulk.

Has anyone else noticed something similar?  Isn't it interesting that the tlames subs don't redirect, rather they go to headless '...' page? Kamba is obviously scraping - I just don't understand the reason for the redirects.

YOMr7Mf

Thanks. SWAGREAM.

Your gut instinct is correct. Yes, it's entirely possible to crawl javascript. Is it still difficult to crawl? As far as I know, yes. So why put up that barrier if you don't have to?

This is pretty interesting because this isn't terribly competitive. It's easier to see the rudiments at work. The finer points seem to be more important.

A recent IMEC experiment noted that you could push a site up through CTR. There's one possibility. Maybe the congregation is more active online and uses a particular set of queries to find the site. Maybe the fact that Life Pointe posts more often gives them more possibilities of being found and thus clicked.

I haven't looked into it, but you may want to see if Life Pointe posts frequently on social channels. That may fractionally drive organic CTR.

I didn't see Life Pointe in any of the organic results for 'baptist church tyler tx'. I found Sylvania showing in the map pack. When I'm at home, my location defaults to Southlake. When I'm in the office, my default location is in Grapevine. I change my search location to Tyler, it was the same every time. However, they are page one organic for 'church tyler tx'.

I'm assuming your search was free of personalization. So that would be pretty interesting to look into as well.

At any rate, if you look at the technical side of things - the Sylvania Church site uses a lot of external JavaScript requests. While the Life Pointe site isn't exactly a gem, it's faster. So you might want to look into that, since page speed is definitely a ranking factor.

I used tools.pingdom.com and set the test location to Dallas, so one could say the test is 'agnostic'.

Sarcy contained in elipses. That's interesting. Though I'm inclined to agree.

The Matt Cutts talked about editorial oversight and materiality. Those are very interesting things, especially materiality.

First, in regard to 'After' on http://www.guyetteroofing.com/blog/montgomery-roof-115. That weird little split looks a lot better than the crazy cobbled psuedo-valley they had going on. I've done some roofing in the past, as a home owner and a starving student (Local job boards - between 15 credit hours - it helps if you can do construction). That job was a big improvement. I would imagine the ridge vent will add a bit of life to the job and make summers a little more bearable.

I've worked with quite a few commercial and residential contractors in the DFW area. There was a common theme that I noticed that I like to call 'Contractor's Syndrome'. Usually I would run into 'Name Roofing and Construction', 'Name Construction', 'Name Contracting', 'Name Contractors' and a few other variants. If the business had been around for more than a few years, the NAP cleanup was usually pretty involved.

I think this is the case here. There are a lot of citations for Guyettes Contracting LLC including the BBB listing. All in all, I picked up Guyette's Roofing and Construction, Guyette Roofing and Guyette's Contracting. The last being the most prominent. So it's safe to say there are actually a lot NAP inconsistencies happening.

There are a lot of great local citations for Guyettes Contracting, so if I had to do it myself and run a business - I would probably err towards using that. The site seems to be doing okayish in organic for three months old. So just make sure that you're properly categorized in your local listings.

I noticed that you have another domain, which is owned by Hibu. If it's not doing anything for you, shut it down and ask them to transfer the domain to you. I've seen domain transfer requests go both ways with Hibu, but I wasn't handling the admin stuff at those times.

As an on-site consideration, I would recommend using Schema markup on at least your contact page. I noticed you're using Weebly, so I'm uncertain of your level of skill with site editing. I'll post a couple of snippets after this, one filled out with Guyette's Roofing - and one that's blank-ish. That way you'll have an example, should you go with a different name.

First Example: Filled Out

Just note that Schema markup isn't cruise control for local/organic rankings. It's just a nifty way to spoon feed search engines and possibly get some nice snippets. Hopefully that will help some.

You should probably have them noindex nofollow the login link. My crawler picked up tons of them.

I just see a white background when I check cache on google.co.uk.

Keyword density is a myth, don't worry about it.

The 'behind the scenes' text is the source code. It could likely be done better, but there's isn't any getting around not having source code. (I won't touch a .Net site, so I'm not trying to sell you anything.)

Also, there appears to be some duplicate content concerns.(e.g.: Page.aspx page.aspx)

There's definitely more to this, but I should probably get a couple hours of sleep before the day job.

There was actually a pretty solid Whiteboard Friday covering a similar topic. The Googles are only 'pretty good' at figuring out which page is the original, and which site should be given better placement for the same content. So you're not being silly for being concerned. Panda.

I honestly think you'll find something you can use in the video, so I won't get too carried away on that subject.

Your next problem is buy-in. Will your client do what needs to be done? To get the sale you have to sell.

Present it as something that hurts resellers as well as the client. Which it likely is, or will, hurt both in a material way. If the resellers aren't being seen well enough due to the duplicate content issue, your client is losing on sales. The reseller is directly losing potential revenue.

So whatever you put together out of this, the wise will heed your words - as they're losing money.

Wow. We all agree. If you are truly paranoid and want to rest easy, you could write a few different versions. If your firm has about 50 partners, that could be tedious and not the best use of your time. But I would say you're 99.9999% okay for now.

You're welcome.

In regard to Schema, you'll probably be ahead of most contractors in the Montgomery area in adoption. It's been around for a few years, all major search engines endorse it's usage. It makes their job easier, so there are some perks.

You can go nuts with Schema markup. Fax, hours of business, logo, reviews and your second cousin's brother... well almost.

Though you will need to edit source code to implement the markup. You can get away with copying and pasting my first example (Though I think this editor trimmed off the word 'Map'.), once you get there with the Weebly WYSIWYG.

This is more of a 'nice to have' in regard to the site's blog; maybe add a little bit of text describing what's happening in the images. Sites get found in ways we never targeted. Mixing up the media a bit helps a lot.

GWT definitely doesn't show you the whole picture. Majestic SEO won't show you the whole picture. Ahrefs or OSE can't show you the whole picture either.

Google has a pretty good idea of your link inventory. They share very little. In my understanding, the spreadsheet you download is just what they've shown you until it's no longer there.

No one set of link data is ever 100%. It's a big internet, but the one source that appears to generally share the least amount of data is Google. That's why you should use multiple sets of link data and do some spreadsheet wizardry to sort out the duplicates.

The general consensus regarding how long it takes to get a link penalty lifted is; "It takes as long as it takes." Some have taken up to a year and a few turned around fairly fast. Four months isn't exactly irregular.

Majestic is showing a lot of deleted links, so there's definitely some progress there. It's just hard to see the wheat from the chaff at a glance. Yeah, the backlink profile was hit hard.

Regarding the 404s... letting them 404 is just wasting crawl budget. It may be a good idea to 410 those and let the bots know those pages aren't there. In regard to what pages were dropped, you might have lost some pretty good links. I haven't done a page level audit, but losing good links with a ton of bad can delay the process as well.

Someone is going to chime in about the 'foundation' of links, and they would be correct. It's a whole other screed - so I'll leave it to them. Seriously, this one looks pretty nasty. Best of luck.

Deinitely make sure to use the hreflang element. And it was a wise choice to have your pages professionally translated.

More information on multiple languages and SEO here.

The hreflang element is actually meant to help you avoid duplicate content issues when it comes to content in different languages.

You were almost there buddy. It looks like you have regex characters that need to be escaped with . Plus, most seem to prefer rewriting index before messing with www.

Give this at try. I took a look at the site before the loop and it doesn't appear to use any CMS per se. If it were a WordPress site, you would want to place the code before the WordPress rewrites.

P.S. You don't need the last comment in the example.

I have a lot going on right now, but if you PM the domain, I can take a look in a week or so.

The rcourier site has been hacked. It's now just a festering repository of scraped content. In short, I'm not going there on a Windows machine. It looks like your site has been substantially scraped. Use the following in Google search:

site:rcourier.com intext:soccer box

You can send a DMCA take down to the hosting company. You can get the information you need from whois.domaintools.com.

Normally this wouldn't be too much of a cause for concern, but if you have the time - do the good guy thing and help clean up the internet.

Youtube is going to show ads on your video when it's displayed on Youtube. You should be able to opt out of ads on your videos via information in this link. You can also turn off related videos via query parameters in the embedded URL.

My personal favorite parameters are &rel=0 and &modestbranding=1. Happy experiments to you!

You would use this code in the head . This should be done for each page. Such as:

I'm not sure if you plan on redirecting people based upon location. There's a lot more about this subject here.

As The Chris Menke has stated, there's no problem with including the city and state in your meta data or on-page markup. It's actually an advantage of sorts.

There are nearly one dozen cities named Dallas in the US. Say you were located in Dallas, TX. What would separate you from Dallas, OR? There would be citations, if you're doing what you need to do for a local business. But I've found that on-page is getting a bit more weight, and it's increasing.

Not sure yet? You can verify a Google My Business listing via Google Webmaster Tools for an indeterminate amount of business categories. If that's not a sign that on-page is gaining weight in the local search scene - I don't know what is.

In fact, the Google Local team has stated that the business's domain is the strongest factor. Would you not like to possibly give them a few more signals, easily? They are the donkey, you have the carrot.

But I would suppose your question arises from an objection to writing; "Profession/Service City, State". There are ways you can do that, and it will still look alright. In fact, wouldn't you want someone to know that they came to the right place immediately, even though it sounds generic?

People don't have time. You have to show them they came to the right place immediately. Title and header markup are excellent ways to do so.

I think you'll be alright just mentioning synonyms.

You don't have to make a new listing for each location, though I recommend making one for each location. Even if they're in the same city, you can differentiate the listings with a descriptor. See here for more on that. It's pretty straight forward.

I'm not terribly familiar with search trends in Australia, but I'm fairly sure you would want the province in the title tag. Province (abbreviation) in the title tag would definitely be better for a local business. So your title tag may look something like Blue Widgets Gold Coast Queensland | Business Name.

The above would likely be the home page title for a business that sells blue widgets in Gold Coast. Now say the business also does Blue Widget Repair as a service. Your service page would look something like **Blue Widget Repair Gold Coast Queensland | Business Name. **

Now if you have another location, in another city - you would want a page with a title of Blue Widgets City Province | Business Name. Going a little further, you could use this page as the link on your business listings. Trust me, it's good stuff.

Have you attempted to crawl the site? If not, I would give it a little Screaming Frog. If I knew the URL, I would have done it already. : )

Sometimes crawl problems look and feel like penalties. That upward trend in pages blocked by robots.txt before the fall is making me a little suspicious. Plus, if it is a problem with crawlability - that's easier to fix than a penalty.

Thank you. Please be sure to read the information at the second link I posted. It looks like it's written using kana.

It's my opinion that the Gary Illyes quote is a little out of context for the situation. Dead inbound links (404 errors) could be a bad thing, if the links are of good quality. It's more than likely Mr. Illyes was addressing on-page 404s, and in that context I would mostly agree.

Though to be pedantic, 404 errors slow page load time - and speed is a ranking factor. So while broken on-page links may not result in a direct penalty, it definitely doesn't do any favors for on-page SEO.

It's a good idea to be as specific as possible. A lot of people tend to over-think the whole deal. Every major search engine, of consequence in the Western hemisphere, has endorsed this form of structured data. If Schema provides a particular type, by all means use it.

The first snippet definitely checks. Your competitors aren't likely using it. The search engines have admitted they're a little slow on the uptake, and you put in the time. You have some pretty good contact info/NAP boiler plate right there.

All the thumbs. First snippet.

Google won't index what it can't crawl. You should be alright, from a duplicate content perspective. If people, real live ones, are trying to reach the site via this link, then you might have problems. If they can't reach it, you can't sell. You'll have to check your server log files to figure that out.

If actual 'hoomans' are trying to reach that URL (Not me bro, you don't want to see me in leggings. I'm in Grapevine TX. You can discount that traffic.)

Otherwise, I like to do a little more than the standard here's a blog link response. This is especially the case when I have an actual site to work with, not a vague question. A portion of the secure version of the site can be crawled, while obeying robots/nofollow which can lead to duplicate content concerns.

Send me a message with your email and I can send you the crawl. At least you'll be able sort out that issue. Your main concern may be a non-concern.

These things always come down to percentages and industries. If the link in question is branded, I might not worry too much for the time being. If the target site has a lot of site wide links, I would be concerned about the next Penguin filter.

Without knowing anything else about the target site, if the statement above checks - odds are your site should be okay for now. Though I would check the Blogspot links for typical blog spam. Again, these things come down to percentages over time.

***Disclaimer: For whoever reads this, never try to game the algo. It will end up biting you. I'm not claiming the OP is gaming or has tried to game the algo. Just don't do it.

It looks like the URL has been scraped. The tags don't conform to Analytics tag conventions. You can find more on that here.

There are grey areas with a bit of wiggle room. That much is certain. I've worked with practices/doctors where you're always routed to a call center. I've also worked with practices/doctors that actually pick up the phone from time to time.

But business is business and people are people. Things can get difficult and messy quick. A lot of doctors are people, engaged in business, as well as medicine. Sometimes business relationships end on bad terms.

Sometimes another local SEO is actively throwing wrenches in your program. It's all local business, so it's always a small world. Say they somehow know Dr. Smith has left the practice.

"Hello, I would like to schedule an appointment with Dr. Smith."

"Dr. Smith has left the practice, may I schedule an appointment with Dr. Jones?"

"No thank you, have a nice day."

Goes on to edit all Dr. Smith listings as closed.

And that's just one potential outcome.

If the URLs were indexed, found and bookmarked, then visited at a later date - possibly - you're missing some sales. I doubt it, but that's something to keep in mind for the future.

The Moz forum is the place to ask about further questions. I may not have the time to get back to you, or not in the time frame you need.

Sending away soon-ish.

Sure, a branded link includes the brand name. 'Bob's Blue Widgets' would be a pure example of branded anchor text if the brand is Bob's Blue Widgets. Whereas 'cheap blue widgets' would be considered a money term/exact match anchor text, and enough of that can get the target site penalized.

Typical blog spam, I'm sure you've seen it. The anchor text will be followed 'money' anchor text. There will be varying topics that run the gamut from Forex Trading to Viagra. One blog may be about Forex, the next may be about a plumber in Tahiti and others could be about casinos - cruises - vacations. That's blog spam in a nutshell.

I made a couple of dashboard widgets. You will need to edit the Includes filters to the proper category page or pages. If you have a folder level called /category/, you'll likely only need one Includes filter.

If the dashboard is too difficult/broken, you can follow the path Martijn suggested. However you'll need to change the date range to Last week and compare to previous period. Change the Primary Dimension to Page and the secondary to Week Index. After that, you'll have to click Advanced and set includes for Page containing your category.

If it's looking good to you, click shortcut. Then click email and the rest should be pretty intuitive.

If you need to filter via regex, a simple example would be: ./category/.

That will match any page with category as a folder. Try out regexpal. You can get started with the above regex and see how these inputs match (highlight) or don't (no highlight).

http://www.url.com/category/bob
http://www.url.com/category/steve
/category/
/nachos/

/category/9
/category/!

category

Have fun! And if anything is broken, well... it's late.

As Donna mentioned, it does matter which listings/directories you need to access and change. For some directories, you may have to use Yext. I personally don't care for the service, as it's a data overlay. Stop paying, and the data reverts to whatever was there in the first place.

Why would you claim and delete the listings? That sounds like it may be counterproductive, in many instances. Claim and modify the listings so they reflect an accurate NAP, where possible.

At any rate, here is a guide from Moz that should help you with your local listing problem. There are some opportunities for automation there. Hopefully the work has been priced accordingly.

The way you're building links isn't going to work. Stop doing it that way.

You do want some links that are followed, but getting no follow links is almost unavoidable. You get a no follow link when someone appends rel=nofollow to the a href link pointing at your site. It's not entirely bad, as you may get some citation value from the nofollow link.

In regard to citation value, if people are talking about your site - that's still a good thing. It can be even better if the link is non-nofollow.

People append nofollow to the link in the hopes that they won't be seen as a black hat reciprocal link, or something worse. It's basically the safest way to link out, as linking to things that are - or could be - bad is terribly unhealthy.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Some customization is going to happen. But regex can come to the rescue. Try:                          .(/bats/|/monkeys/|/puppies/).   where bats, monkeys and puppies are your categories.

The (parenthesis) is a grouping of folders. The | says 'or'. The .* on either side just says just says match anything. If you only want the categories without the pages, just remove the last .* from the expressions.

Test it out.

http://www.url.com/category/bob
http://www.url.com/category/steve
/category/
/nachos/

/category/9
/category/!

category

http://www.url.com/monkeys/spider-monkey
http://www.url.com/puppies/ugly-puppies
http://www.url.com/bats/bat-man

I once had to match every possible misspelling of 'warrior'. My eyes started bleeding, but I got the majority of it.

I actually started working nights at a business class hotel. It made sense to me. Get paid extra while working on projects in the back, and overcome my hermetic ways. (the level I like to isolate myself is totally unhealthy, for a number of reasons)

I mean, I was staying up all night and making coffee anyway. If business is slow for a month, the bills are covered. Ah yes, the rough & tumble early days. Plus I have strong incentive to do that whole 'hygiene' thing. (remain presentable in button-down shirt, tie, slacks and dress shoes - does wonders for the morale)

Most people, if they're unfamiliar with the property, are most concerned with what the rooms will look like - after price. And with the listing changes, they would see both - from the drop - before they even call. I know the Wyndham family is in the midst of a big 'photo refresh' push, across all of their franchises. (sorry, photogs... it appears they've already selected their people)

Point being, exterior shots aren't being prioritized - it would appear - though there will be some exterior shots.

It all seems entirely reasonable.

I would say don't use infinite scrolling, not yet. A designer doesn't understand. They want everything to be fancy. Google isn't terribly ready for fancy yet.

At this point, I think infinite scroll is a horrible thing that needs to be shot in the face.

"Hey guys, let's load the entire site - all of the bells and whistles at once!"

That can be really mess with page load speed. So what about time to first byte? It doesn't matter if the first byte appears at the speed of light, if you're loading 450 MB.

If the Webmaster Central Blog didn't answer your question, you're pretty well on your own.

To expand a bit on what Claudio has said, it's not really about a dead-set number of links. If you give them a metric, they will attempt to hit that metric. Even if hitting that target will result in a net negative for the client.

For instance, I can probably get you 10 .edu links right now. Between security vulnerabilities and un-moderated comment sections, it's entirely possible. But you definitely don't want those links, especially if you get them in that way.

You should probably reward them based upon how they reach out and what the results were. It may not necessarily be a link. The results could be more valuable than a link. Treating them like your low-pressure sales team/brand ambassador will probably better align their interests with those of your company and external stakeholders.

Though there's some big IFs here. That will only work IF you give them something to sell/represent that somehow adds significant value for everyone involved. IF that doesn't happen, they'll end up trying to push the same crud a million others peddle every day. Basically put, Garbage In - Garbage Out.

Instead of setting a hard and fast number, focus on how well they build relationships and how creatively they market your brands.

I've seen something similar to this many times. It's not terribly likely that it will adversely affect your rankings. Though someone may be trying to test your site security.

You could possibly better zero in on the source by using a combination of city/network domain as a secondary dimension to the direct medium.

If you have multiple profiles, you could setup a filter based on what the secondary dimension insights yield - should the traffic continue.

However, a less permanent solution would be a custom report with an exclude for direct traffic from a certain city/region.

Edit: Second thought, if the traffic doesn't stop and starts negatively affecting site performance - you may be able to find the offending IP and block them.

Yeah, the Oatmeal comic was correct: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home

Degradation of social skills. Plus no real sense of urgency to acquire new business. It's too easy to sit back and play in graphs and sheets all day. Then with the increased interest for the development side, I could feel productive chasing shiny objects all day. After all, I was 'working' wasn't I?

I could work for one of the agencies in the area, but I don't want to sign non-competes/covenants or a NDA. Unless it's mine, never another agency.

But yeah, one does meet a lot of business people at a hotel, made for business persons. I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool sales person. It keeps conversations natural, as well as likely.

Plus, I get pretty decent discounts on hotels everywhere. Should a convention or client require travel, that's nice.

Just have to Guerilla/Science things while the momentum builds. In fact, I received a prospective client recently - due to my previous answers in Moz Q&A. That was nice.

But yeah, rambling. Lots of new photos should be coming from Wyndham family hotels, at least for the next year. It's mandated by corporate. Perhaps it would be interesting to note if a set of fresh photos does much for them organically - as a hotel family (in aggregate).

Is it plugged in? Is it turned on? Have you rebooted? Is it blocked by Robots.txt?

I really don't know how that forum handles sigs, so I can't say for certain. What you can do is check a handful of your old posts at random, if the sig is gone - the links are gone.

The problem with all link data, even Google Webmaster Tools, is that it's never up to date. Mozbot, Googlebot and all the various crawlers have to crawl the links to show us link data. It can take a while between removal and another crawl, so the answer is 'patience'.

Odds are the errant meta robots tag is in header.php. You should be able to find the file in the back end under Appearance/Editor. With that said, be very careful - make a backup if you must 'cowboy code'- then work with a text editor (Sublime, Komodo, Notepad++, Notepad, etc.) to copy and paste your work.

I would like to chime in here. It appears no one has mentioned links to domains. In my experience, multi-location efforts generally make for a bit of spam.

If I can't see the domains, I can't tell you it's an issue. Though it's generally better to make a page per location.

I would like to know more about the domains you own.

You'll probably be okay, it appears most of it is ebbing. Though I would definitely look at your folder level traffic. Penalties can happen on the folder and page level as well. It's not so bad as to merit a domain level penalty.

I would be more concerned if the anchor text targeted something you do want.

In regard to disavows, disavow early and as often as necessary.