Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi All,

Did good chunk of research here prior to posting on sitelinks.

• Tried the Webmaster Console to remove the links
• Tried removing via sitemap, WP SEO plugin removal
• Now removed unnecessary pages, and redirected to homepage.
• Re petitioned for removal via Webmaster Google Console area.

Whats been the recent conservative realistic estimate of when sitelinks will be removed/refreshed? Also any tricks to expedite recrawl or re build of sitelinks. The site has very low traffic SMB that uses site purely for portfolio and no ranking/traffic purposes. so maybe the priority is very low for this site.

Back in the day sitelinks were a lot easier to manage or so it seems.

Thoughts?

Totally @Nadiamo, do let me know if you want to run any more thoughts or ideas by us, here..

I will answer your 3 specific options and general thoughts at the bottom:

1. Yes you have the correct game plan here.  Postal code may or may not help unless it is specifically searched for.

2. Unique content is the name of the game, each neighborhood/area will have their own unique elements you can write about in your content and this will engage the user and bring familiarity and will rank better, and this solves duplicate issues.

3. Greater area reach is hard unless you are dominating with reviews or other local listing factors. The goal is having a physical location close to your area of intent.

"product is expensive so this justifies" - does this justify potentially opening another physical location to be closer to the searcher?

Also how is the current showroom main location doing, with search and its response? Is it in the target area, is it reaching customers well?

Still looking for a solution, Thanks

Aware of both those options, but both attemp to close the listing. Thanks for trying to help Jung

I have listings that I need disconnected from my main Google My Business account.

I can close, or remove which is similar as closing,  but the goal is not to close the listings, just to remove the association to my google account, and im not transferring the listing as well.

Anyone know how to accomplish this?

Goal is to clean up old listings that are exist but I dont manage

Thanks for all the help

Effectdigital,

Critical Path optimization is just one part of a bigger amp pie including:

1. Allow only asynchronous scripts
2. Size all resources statically
3. Don't let extension mechanisms block rendering
4. Keep all third-party JavaScript out of the critical path
5. All CSS must be inline and size-bound
6. Font triggering must be efficient
7. Minimize style recalculations
8. Only run GPU-accelerated animations
9. Prioritize resource loading
10. And More

So amp process covers a lot, and agreed top devs is ideal, but in WordPress world there are plugins that successfully cover 90% of what a solid dev would do in a custom project, and for many cases a plugin is more then enough so looking for more input, of any that had success. Again thank you for the current response this is helpful.

Thanks Joe,

Anyone have experience for extended length blog articles that took advantage of amp functionality?And saw rank boost? This is the info I am looking for.

Thanks all

Hello beloved,

Been some time since I have  been on, planning to return and help out and be bit more active.

Need some latest thoughts and input, on amp plugins for Wordpress, and their results and effect on rankings?

Thank you all in advance

Yeah I noticed the same even for paid customers. At first I thought it was for unpaid customers, as there is a way to setup your profile via someone requesting to set it up, but not get a followed link. However checking paid aka Verified accounts it does not have a follow link, really interesting..

"Don’t see a favorite product of yours? Ask us to carry it!"

I would reward that a bit, and say "Don’t see a favorite product of yours? Ask if we have it!" Not trying to be picky, however asking to carry is a hope for future availability, customers turn online because it's immediate order to their current desire.

Granted you will not be able to produce the product, however with this wordage it's more likely that customers will ask and give you input into their desires.

Just food for thought!

Hi Dan,

Thanks for this! I had initially asked and then without getting an answer had to go dig around and figure this out myself. At the end of the day I made it happen!

Thanks for looking through this again. Ill mark it as answered!

With regular redirect(s) the following URLs did not work, any ideas for the .htaccess code to make this work?

http://www.domain.com/?view=featured redirect to http://www.domain.com/

http://www.domain.com/contact-us.html?view=message&layout=message&pf=1&redirect_on_success= to http://www.domain.com/contact-us.html

and

http://www.domain.com/login.html?return=aW5kZXgucGhwP29wdGlvbj1jb21fcGhvY2Fkb3dubG9hZCZ2aWV3PWNhdGVnb3J5JmlkPTEyOmNvbWJpbmUtZXZhbHVhdGlvbiZJdGVtaWQ9NzM4 to http://www.domain.com/login.htm

Thanks guys!

I assume you are talking about quantity as in say the number of articles vs the length of each article. If so you can track one metric that may be beneficial in this case, it is the inner linking between the articles the more articles you have the more interlinking that can be accomplished and this if done correctly helps.

This is true for the length of article, (assuming stellar content here), the longer the article the more room for quality inner linking and external linking, more room for awesome headlines and images that grab the attention of those that skim the article.

With this in mind you can see why a longer article and more of them can make sense!

Now for tools if you are into checking how much articles you have vs your competitor, you can use Screaming Frog or equivalents to scan the site and count the number of articles, and compare that to yours, as an example of course much more can be done to scrape and count the number of inner links, thin content etc.

Here is more of what can be done with screaming frog

Hope this helps!

Hi Ruben,

At this point, even though they encourage you still have an option to override their suggestions and go with want you prefer? If that's correct you should be good to go. Unless they make it a requirement. But thanks for filling us in!

Great Question!

True Google switched to # for Ste. I think fairly recently. I think Yelp still uses Ste.  

Awesome William, its great to have a Googler input in these discussions

Hi Ruben,

With citations, you always start with matching the address with your local post office, like USPS uses. This is important for things such as the difference between using Ste or Suite for names, St vs Street, etc. Google tends to honor the decisions of your local post office.

Pertaining to the zip code, 5 digit zip code is still the king for consistency. Main reason being is that most places still allow only 5 digits for zip code vs 9 digits.  One camp may say well 5 + 4 is still consistent but gives extra location info, but I haven't seen any local benefit for "+4" other than the fact that it helps with identification for the local post office. But in terms of local SEO NAP consistency trumps in my opinion, and I totally agree with William on both accounts.

If you can opt out of leaving +4 I would do so. When it comes to adding your zip code on Google it gives you an example of 5 digits, even though it gives you a link to the USPS site which will give you 9 digits. And I would match Googles NAP. You should not be penalized for this on Bing end, if you choose to leave this out. Can you be penalized if you leave the +4 in? Maybe (due to inconsistency) but most likely not.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ahalliday

That is the plan. I was just hoping there would be a solid automated system or process by now. But I guess its back to the trusted manual approach. Thanks

All in One Schema should have it:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets/faq/

Hope this helps

There is an interesting situation with caching mechanisms such as Cloudflare and many others; where the benefit of caching the website for speed only comes in when you have significant traffic and simultaneous traffic to your website.

Some caching plugins take more server resources initially, and actually tend to slow down your site than speed it up, until the user traffic increases and then you see the benefit of the caching for speed.

As for security aspect of Cloudflare much of the security options are available for free. If you don't realize the benefit of the paid subscription you can still enjoy the security benefits of the free option.

Hope this helps

Hi Mark,

The nature of web-page authority usually takes time to grow. Its a significant metric (see ranking factors page, it is the most correlated factor) Its the one that is hardest to influence as part of factors in page authority is TIME.

Therefore the TIME factor takes the most time in SEO

Generally it takes 8 to 20 weeks for local citations to show up in search results. I would not expect MOZ to have a faster approval and listing on that end. But again MOZ can do some spectacular things, it is just that this is on the directories end to list the citations.

Hi Mark,

1. It comes down to substantial editorial discretion/review by the paid directory for it to be legit in Google's eyes. Best of the Web, BBB, and many other paid services that have substantial editorial process to review the business leads to a high quality paid directory and Google is totally okay with that, as Matt Cutts states in the link above. The video explains it well the difference between acceptable paid directories and those that are not.

2. Andy mentioned a great source Whitespark that I use as well.  However, I would start here: http://moz.com/learn/local/citations-by-category its free and Google approved if you will citations, to start out with. Sure enough they have the plumber category: http://moz.com/learn/local/citations-by-category#Plumbers

Also: https://moz.com/local/search and http://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-uk

If you take care of these especially all if not most in the last link I sent, you should generally be in good shape, if not you can them get even more with whitespark!

Hope it helps!

Hi Henya,

CDNs do not cause problems with duplicate content, duplicate content issues if they come are usually sourced from something other than CDNs. As result this is possibly why MOZ is not picking it up.

CDNs serve content from different locations TRUE, however it is accessed via the SAME domain/URL. In other words one URL can be coming from different CDN/cloud servers, but since its that same identical URL, no duplicate content issues arise.

Hope this helps!

Hi Mark,

Very very good questions!

1. There is a distinction between general web directories and link farms and local citation directories.  Local citations in relevant directories is still a must method for local seo ranking. As Google Local itself aggregates information from authoritative and relevant web directories such as: Yelp, Yellowpages, Foursquare, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Citysearch, etc. **The distinction is that Google uses this for local results for your local business, and not for organic results, for an online business, as an example. **So for organic results, online businesses, you can still have few solid and relevant directories such as BBB or Best of the Web, but you dont want to over do it here. For local results as much relevant and authoritative directories is the name of the game. Hope that clarifies this, if its still confusing let us know.

2. By if the client has a blog, I was going off your hypothetical example of the plumber. What I mean here is writing **on your own blog **if you have one. Again it does not even have to be a blog, you can create a page, you can even call it a landing page appropriately.  It will be a quality content rich page, that you are trying to rank for organically.  Good you are aware that Guest Blogging is now considered by many an abused tactic that is now crossing over into the spammy category. So you are correct in this.

Hope this clarifies it for ya, again let me know if you have any more questions!

Hi Mark,

If the client has a blog, I also had good success, creating articles on talking about a plumber in [other city you want to focus on] and having this be a solid article at least 750-1500 word article with maybe a contact us or a business info on the sidebar for that location. These articles would rank organically for the the city plus industry that you are interested in.

Being a blog you have the flexibility about being creative in what you write in the article about the certain area you would like to rank for!

Hope this helps, and if you have more questions about this definitely ask!

Glad to help and thankful to be part of such a great community!

Hey Duncan,

There are few good ones. But generally when it comes to using a plugin for redirection, I go with the Redirection plugin (I know clever name ) But its the most popular plugin with 1.5 million downloads and for some good reasons its definitely a feature filled plugin, here are some neat things it does:

• 404 error monitoring - captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• Custom 'pass-through' redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• Redirection methods - redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrers
• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post's URL changes
• Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
• Full regular expression support
• Apache .htaccess is not required - works entirely inside WordPress
• Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL

Those are some great features there.

One thing to Note A plugin with so many features can interfere with some of your other plugins so test accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Hi Christy I believe its 15GB of storage right, probably a typo.

If hosting exists subdomain redirects for clean URLs is great. Also dropbox.com and many other services work, with subdomain redirects, like so.

Hi Brad,

Try photobucket.com. Its been known to give you flexible embed and link options. Here is an example of the permalink structure:

http://i237.photobucket.com/albums/ff255/robynm17/uyergyey1.jpg

Hope it helps

Yea right, with the sharks eating up the smaller guys, and growing bigger and bigger.

The reassuring thing is that Google is generally on your side, and will tell you to play by the rules because it has stated that there is a lot of spam to fight, but it is tackling it one big spam tactic at a time.

Oooo... thats right! Great point Miriam

Hi Stacey,

I am not sure there is _one top provider _in this industry. As some have different methods for acquiring rewards and giving out the rewards. It may be the question of what works better for your customers.

Here is a good article at various types of programs available:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31990/7-Customer-Loyalty-Programs-That-Actually-Add-Value.aspx

http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/customer-loyalty-program-tips/

Hope this helps!

Hi WMCA,

Google Places can get this data from other citations. However once you claim control of your Google listing it "should" take in your input. However Google still to this day has issues, especially if you recently moved from Google Local to Google+ Page.

What you should do if you do not see new business hours change within a day:

1. Login to your local dashboard

2. Click on the listing in question

3. Click the Report Problems with this Listing link

4. Fill out the form, and send it off to Google

Hope this helps!

Hi Chris,

You are correct that keyword stuffing is no longer a legit SEO practice, and it is not ideal for user readability. Can you still get away with it sure. However, it is not a long term strategy as at any moment Google can pull its plug on you and de rank or penalize these efforts.

A better approach is to rank one keyword per page, you can rank for all the terms and potentially even higher then trying to rank one page for 3 terms. This is a better approach for users and Google alike.

To step into the shoes of the competitors. There was a time when the competition was low and ranking for multiple keywords per page was doable and so you had limited pages, and many words to rank for, so that is what you went after. Back in the day keyword stuffing was the way to go. As a result, companies such as Morton Buildings could easily rank for them. Currently they have built up the authority and the traffic for these terms, and so they are easily ranking top position for short tail (two word) competitive keywords. So in their eyes, they may even have in-house SEOs that understand that keyword stuffing is a no-no; however, they are currently ranking for these terms, and they may not want to touch and change what is not broken in their eyes. As soon as Google or other search engines take action on this, they will have to take appropriate measures to change and fix things up.

Again, for someone starting out in small business, at this point, going for multiple keywords per page is not a realistic approach. You have much better shot going after one keyword per page. Even a long tail keyword such as "small wooden horse barns" vs competitive "horse barns" to try to rank competitively.

Hope this helps!

Really great question. MOZ local is definitely most bang for your buck, however Yext offers listings that MOZ local does not include, and so if you have the budget why not use both right!.

According to moz's https://moz.com/local/how they answer a similar question, so this gives us a some-what complete answer of go ahead and use both:

If I already manage my listings on sites in your network, what will happen to those listings if I use Moz Local? Do you override them?

Response:

• In most cases, we will not override your listings. Localeze and Superpages will reject our efforts to publish your listings if you’re already managing them on those platforms. You can still manage listings independently on those platforms—or remove those listings and establish them through Moz Local.

Sure, glad to help

Hi Syed,

At this point it is all automated, there is no webmaster input (other than removing the sitelinks that you do not want to show up under Google WMT) or schema to help with this.

Also note, that sitelinks are search query specific. Example the same homepage for a site can display different results based on the query, in this case with sitemaps or not, at times schema might be displayed instead of sitemaps; meaning other schema that is set up can at times take away from the sitemaps that you are trying to display.

Some say that it is authority based and the more authority your site has, the sooner the sitelinks show up. However with a great structured site, for example a Wordpress site with easy to follow permalink structure, sitemaps, no duplicate content. I have seen even non authoritative and new domains showing up with sitemaps quickly.

More info from Google:

"We only show sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are automated. We're always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future. There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en 

Hope it helps!

Hi Ruben,

It could mean that yes you are doing something right, as in getting more links, or just that moz has recently crawled or found more links, and as result you are seeing a jump in your DA. A 2-5 point increase or decrease is not out of the ordinary

Here is more relevant info: http://moz.com/community/q/freaked-out-over-domain-authority-ranking-drop

Hope this helps!

If you feel the links are harming you or your SEO efforts in anyway, you can go ahead and disavow them. However, the disavow link does not remove the links so it does not help with 404 errors, but will ignore them when it comes to your rankings.

Hope this helps!

Hi Jacquie,

Usually with things like this, I'd wait a while until moz and others give their go ahead. Or since the update is per website property if you have properties that are not as critical (in syncing with moz) you can start with those and see how it goes for you. ...Id wait a while, either for Moz to give their approval.

Hope this helps!

Your questions can have many suggestions and little tips but by far one of the biggest ones answers this part of your question: "So what is the new purpose for our blogs in this new age of Google and ever-increasing social influence?"

Produce engaging content, and be know as the authority in a certain topic and social shares, comments, and traffic will naturally come for an ever-increasing social influence. Its one of those easier said then done things.

Hope this helps!

Dr. Pete in this article should provide some answers, food for thoughts, and hopefully a suggestion:

http://moz.com/blog/how-do-i-get-googles-bulleted-snippets

Hope this helps!

Michael, Philip is on the dot mass footer linking was an SEO trick of the past that does not benefit much in terms of an SEO boost. If its messy clean it up. Leave it ONLY if it makes sense from a user experience, and so optimize for a real human person as he would browsing the lower part of your site.

Hope this helps

Hi Oliver,

"Ratings in Google Product Search consist of an aggregate ratings score with snippets of customer reviews from third party sites and from Google Checkout which are based on your store name and the registered domain."

These ratings from Google come from _"various sources" _including:

Bizrate(Shopzilla), Pricegrabber, Epinions, Yahoo, Review Centre, Viewpoints, Google Checkout Reviews, Reseller Ratings, Trustpilot, RateItAll.com, eKomi, and more.

To read more the above is taken from here

PS Google Checkout is no longer a place where reviews can be acquired as it is being cut.

Hope this Helps!

Hi Jeremy,

The general consensus here at the moz Q&A is to send you over to: http://moz.com/community/recommended#local-search-services

You are correct many are above this budget, but I still want to encourage you to give that a shot, if nothing works out, PM me and lets chat and I might be able to help out

How much links per month per location are you looking to create? (This might help some wanting to help)

Here at moz community we recommend: http://moz.com/community/recommended#local-search-services

Hi Andreas,

I cannot comment on the getseojs, or prerender I did not use those. However, google can execute "some" JavaScript to find content but Google has limitations.

This article should help: http://moz.com/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really

Hope this helps!