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I am not sure that "sandboxing" is an appropriate word at this time. If google takes a manual action against your site they notify you in webmaster tools. If the problem with your site is detected by algorithm, they simply demote your site. I honestly think that you need experienced professional help with this.

Hi Jesse, Competing is nearly always possible, but the unknown quantity is time (how long it will take). Citations are definitely important, as some of our members have wisely recommended here, but the authority of the website is, in my opinion, an equal or greater factor in overall local rankings.There is debate about the exact importance of each ranking factor, as evidenced by the recent Local Search Ranking Factors. I recommend that you read this 2013 survey and try to do as much as you possibly can with the client in the foundational ranking factors category of the survey to start with. All of these steps will take time. So, it's definitely possible to outrank competitors, but the effort/funding/time that will take is going to be unique to each market and client. I would share the survey with the client to help them begin to understand the diversity of efforts that need to be made to begin to get in the game. Good luck!

Search Office Space's answer nailed it.

The site is 10 years old, the blog 4 or 5 years old, and has held top positions for extremely competitive keyword phrases such as 'health insurance quotes' and 'individual health insurance'.  The site was hit by penguin,  a panda, and subsequent pandas.  I successfully recovered the site from an 'unnatural links' penalty, which required the removal of a lot of links.  The site began to rank for primary keywords, but not great.  Top 50.  I saw this as an accomplishment. I hope that helps.  I left out details initially because I was hoping someone could be able to tell me if what I am experiencing is indicative of a known issue.  Thanks for your help, happy to add more detail.

Hi Gianluca, If you can describe what types of schema you have seen to be affected by authority, as in my experience setting up fresh brand new sites with authorship seemed to have authorship show really fast? I did see most if not all the review sites with aggregate reviews in their snippets drop a while back (earlier than August for my case)

Cool - Many thanks Kurt ! All Best Dan

The video is already produced hence didnt have the opportunity to define goals from outset.  Being the projects seo im looking to get rich snippets and conversions.  The videos are tv program editions. Im asking for dedicated page per video with added media such as transcriptions (descriptions as a minimum).  However looking very unlikely will get dedicated page and only thumbnails directory hence trying to decide how aggressively to push for dedicated page or settle for YT as an alternative. Im obviously also after links so doubt YT option worthwhile although thinking people may well search for programme archives on YT to watch old editions hence programmes should be uploaded there too for that reason (otherwise they will find other peoples uploads of lesser quality old editions and with no particular structure or content control such as descriptions). Hence to maintain brand ownership of videos archive on YT im thinking of suggesting uploading to YouTube as well as trying to get the max out of self hosting on site for SEO (links, snippets & conversions too)

Hello, You must go to your Webmasters Tools account and use Labs, Instant Previews, and check if there are any differences between different versions of the website and if Google detects any problems. If not, it's possible that in 5 september, you were blocking google from crawling resources such as css. I checked your robots.txt file, and it seems fine - as long as you do not want to restrict Google from indexing those pages. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

The best thing to do is to create assets on these product listings where you can add certain unique content to the pages and minimize the duplicate and a "mix" to these specific listings. great implementation is Zillow. check out these home listings on zillow and see the zillowestimates and other information that zillow provide to the user. the mix is helping getting their listings rank higher because they are differentiating themselves from others. but adding more "information" from the data they are collecting. hope it helps

Hi WebDesignBarrie, I'm not totally sure I know what you mean by "local rich snippets". I'm going to take a guess that you are talking about using Schema??? If so, yes, it is completely fine for a single business with multiple physical locations to publish a unique page for each location and put Schema markup for the location, as well as for other elements like testimonials, if desired. And, it's also fine to have more than one location in the footer. My rule of thumb is that it's fine to do this provided there are less than 10 locations. If there are more than that, I think it makes the footer too unwieldy. It sounds like you have just 4 locations and should be fine. If I've misunderstood your questions, please just let me know.

As a news portal, duplicate content is unavoidable (unless you make up your own news, which actually has been known to do well...) If you are selling articles, the buyers will tag them for their websites. If they leave them index, follow and put their own canonical on them (common, in my experience) be aware that they can outrank you for your own content if their site has more authority. And having the same content on many sites with conflicting canonicals probably is not going to be worth much SEO-wise for any of them. As far as articles that are given to you, you should use the canonical of the originating site to give them credit for creating the material. This won't get you search traffic, but readers on your site would have the content right there at their fingertips, and would not have to go to another site to read it. I tend to think that noindex-nofollowing a substantial fraction of your site might raise some red flags. The assumption here is that the content duplication is being made simply as a convenience to the readers. If you are doing it to increase your rankings, it probably won't work. Excellent, original content should stay on your own site and not be sold.

I agree with both Mayank and Marcus above.  To do this, the site and the blog need to be on the same server.  The DNS record can only point to a domain / sub domain... not sub directories (folders).

Not sure about MaxMind, but yes you do have to be carefull with GeoIP targeted content, A simalr question has come up about it before, hopfully that will help you. http://moz.com/community/q/showing-different-content-according-to-different-geo-locations-on-same-url

To be honest I wouldn't use Crazy Domains, they are a real night mare if you want to transfer domains, I have also seen many companies let Crazy Domains inventory expire as the auto renew set up is not great. As stated above I would go with a Company like Ventra IP or Netfleet (these guys really know domains)

Well the thing about the dot BIZ site is that they are manly targeting this keyword alone, and they are not worrying about any other keywords. Google still does give some favor to EMD (exact match domains) with targeting keywords. A few other tips: 1. Look at the backlinks they have used and try to copy some for your keywords. 2. Try and move the AADL keyword to first in your title. 3. Internally link to AADL within your website to make use of your internal link juice. 4. Build backlinks to your page but mix up the anchors with brand/ url/ generic ect. Keep adding new content. This way you should rank for AADL

You bet - please mark my answer as Good response!

Stewart, The canonicalization tag identifies the URL where the one true version of content can be found.  The tag used on the one true version AND all on the copies of the true version are exactly same tag because the copies will point to the true version and the true version will point to itself.  Often the version you're going to set as the one true version is that which has the shortest URL or the one without any parameters added to the end of it. The whole purpose of the canonicalization tag is to be able to say "Hey Google, I know I have a bunch of URLs that have the same content--I know it's not ideal but there's nothing I can do about that. So what I want you to do is only count this specific URL in your index so all the others don't count against me as duplicate content." Here's more detail on the topic: Canonicalization and the Canonical Tag - Learn SEO - Moz

Hey There, I think you're probably correct in assuming this is just a hiccup with GWT, particularly if the sitemap was unreachable for some time. Have you actually looked at line 697 of the sitemap?  Throw it into Notepad++ and check it out.  Maybe there IS something going on with one of your post titles including some weird characters.  It would be worth investigating if you're overly worried about it (which you shouldn't be honestly). I'd dismiss the error in GWT and see if it crops up again over the next month or so.  If it does (of if you're hyper-vigilant) take a look at the Sitemap and see if you can discern anything different/wrong about line 697.  Sounds like there isn't if the validator didn't pick it up. Either way this should be a low priority item on your webmaster radar!  Sitemaps are mostly for indexing purposes and if the URL on line 697 (and all other URLs too, I suppose) is/are getting indexed you're good to go anyhow (I'd bet a bottle of whiskey that it's being indexed anyway if your site is being crawled regularly). Hope that helps, Jacob @ Distilled.

NO Kidding?! That's amazing. Learn something new everyday. There ya go, there's your other option Tony. Good luck!

I agree with CleverPhD. Keywords in URLs are extremely helpful both in terms of generating traffic and tracking your reporting in Analytics.