Hi,

I don't see anything wrong with this strategy unless the URL D is related to the other URLs that you intend to redirect. If they all are different then you need to find out the other way.

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hi,

You might want to navigate on these threads for getting detailed information about Trust Pilot:

https://moz.com/community/q/schema-aggregate-ratings-and-trustpilot
https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-get-star-ratings-in-serps-using-trustpilot-reviews

For the competitor's site, they just have one review on Google which is kind of a negative. I guess, it's a coding tweak.

Let's see what other suggests.

Umar

Hey Henya,

I think having the local number does matter.. In this way, google relate way better with your local business as it considers that your business does belong from that location. Same goes with the users.

Umar

Abbas, if you also publish 3-5 features post, I'd love to know the bounce rate, traffic stats and social count of them. If they are low, it means you need to seriously work on the promotion strategy.

For handling those 404s, it's better to redirect them on relevant pages. Check out these resources for handling redirection:

https://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
https://moz.com/community/q/best-way-to-handle-404-errors

Apart from that, do consider my above suggestions.

Umar

Dear Abbas,

Thanks for posting your question.

Your blog has good authority and the design is quite simple. It's good to know that you're using Yoast for handling all the on-page things.

Problems:
Abbas you really don't need to post 4-8 posts every day for the sake of traffic. Quantity of posts will never bring you desired traffic unless you achieve some significance. Another thing that I notice is the low word-count and absence of interactive content (videos, images b/w the posts, etc) in majority of your blogs.  I think you might have a high bounce rate also.

Solution:

1. Do aggressive keyword research before writing.
2. Find out the crawling issues that search console highlighting
3. Post in-depth and interactive content.
4. Start content marketing activities.
5. Promote your blog to all the related communities.
6. Cite external high authority links in your content (you can put nofollow if you're conscious)
7. Allow Guest contributors and add a separate page for that. (This thing instantly grab the attention of fellow bloggers)
8. Conduct experts round-up posts and interviews.

I am pretty sure that, the above things will surely help you out.

Good luck!

Umar

Luke,

Refer to this fantastic post of Modestos for better understanding:

https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

This will certainly help!

Umar

Eddie,

I believe if they are not focussing on Local SEO, there will be no effect on their rankings. Yes, I agree it's not good for the visitors if they don't find any mean of communication and this might affect them in a long run.

Umar

Hey Sarah,

It's always recommended to use words that makes sense to people and search engines. For punctuations in particular, Google usually ignore them with the exception of some.

The punctuations that you can use are: hyphen, underscores, pipes & colon.

The punctuations that should be avoided are: ' + . , | ! " $ %  / ( ) = ? ^ * ;   > ] [ @' For more details, refer to this article:
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/watch-your-punctuation-online.html

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Jawahar,

It very much depends on the "free blogging sites" you pick.. If you're referring to article directories or web 2.0 kind of sites for getting links on your anchors, I wouldn't suggest you to go with this approach.

As the authority of these sites are pretty much on stake and after the ever going Penguin saga it's good to avoid them. You may try to reach out decent blogs from your niche and try to obtain links from them.

Be safe!

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Kael,

I won't recommend skipping H1/H2 tags for **. These tags have specific purposes and they should be use accordingly. Having H1 as the page/post title shows that what your page will about so it's better to use them.

As for the http://www.muscleandfitness.com, even they are using the H1 in post titles. For example, check out this link:
http://www.muscleandfitness.com/athletes-celebrities/news/jon-stewart-host-2015-summerslam I am not sure in which context your consultant recommended this but I'd love to know the impact of this if he has adopted this approach in past.

Hope this helps!

P.S:Sorry for Summer Slam link, I'm a huge WWE fan and can't wait for this Sunday

Umar**

Hey Michael,

Usually these kind of sites belong to a network that runs multiple sites.. Whois look up in the best option to track the details but if it's also not workout like your case, I submit another business with all the wrong details, IP address, fake email address and wait for the confirmation email. Once I get that, I contact them from my original address.

The other option that I lookout is to search on social media, though the chances are less to find the real pages or accounts but you can contact the people who shared something about them in past. For this site, I searched on Twitter.

If nothing works out, then you can clearly tell your client about the efforts you did. In most of the cases, they appreciate your efforts and you can move on.

Hope this helps!

Umar