Welcome to the Q&A Forum

First try to contact the web development people over at that place and ask to remove that link (they might have been hacked or something). If there is no response, than yes - disavow. If it continues - then you can report them through Google.

Thanks for taking the time to respond in depth, GreenStone. We appreciate the advice and have passed your response along to the web hosting company (along with a frustrated email) explaining they're not adhering to anyone's best practices. Hopefully this will convince them!

Hi Tom, I'd definitely have a go at the suggestions provided by Verb Interactive and see if that makes any difference. It could be a case of Google not yet approving your domain for rich snippets in search results. Have you ever had rich snippets appear in search results yet? If not, it can take some time and Google need to see the right markup and quality signals in order for this to happen. Cheers. Paddy

Thanks for sharing. This is an interesting case for me. On one hand by writing technical no keyword content he likely drew a lot of technical links to the site due to depth. Links from high authoritative sites like Colleges and Government sites. On the other hand it may have limited appeal to the general population due to the technical nitty gritty, where they just want to know if "X" firm handle said type of cases and what kind of cost is associated with it. But I could also see how more important high profile clients may find the technical stuff more important as cost is less of an issue. All and all this was a good read. Thank you, Don

Many thanks for your advice - yes, it seems like the logical way forward, so I'm following your recommendations

Many thanks again CleverPhD, and thanks for your input Martijn - much appreciated. I guess one issue may be the mass alteration of title tags acting as a spam flag, as I have hundreds of pages to deal with - most of the website :-I - I am advising that the changes are implemented gradually so we don't upset Google - is my caution justified?

Hi KJ, Agree with the consensus here that building mini sites is not the right approach. Take whatever energy you would have put into developing these and channel it into making the landing pages for your locations the best in their industry/towns. I was just watching a great little video by Darren Shaw in which this is one of the things he covers. Might be worth sharing with your team: http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/70-website-optimization-basics-for-local-seo And earlier this year, Phil Rozek penned some pretty fine tips on making your pages strong: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/06/25-principles-of-building-effective-city-pages-for-local-seo/ I am curious about one element of your original post. You mention, "We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations." I wasn't sure whether you were saying that you've never done well in them, were doing well in them until something changed (such as the universal rollout of Local Stacks) or something else. With the latter, I would guess that a huge number of businesses are now struggling to cope with the fact that there are only 3 spots to rank for any keyword, necessitating greater focus on lower volume keywords/categories, organic and paid results. Everybody but the top 3 businesses is now in this boat. Very tough.

cheers rob, i will wait a week or 2 before rolling it site wide so i have to evidence of no effect to back me up incase it does go wrong and go from there. thanks for your time

Very much appreciated CleverPhD!

I believe the issue here may be what you are entering into the search engine. You can emulate your location and check the query as if you were in a geographically different place. Even going incognito still passes your location, making local SEO more difficult. Go to Settings (the gear symbol) in the top right of google search, click search settings and change the location to the city your are optimizing for. That may help, but I am unsure what the exact issue is. When you say it doesn't rank well in organic search, I need to know the keywords you are tracking. According to Ahrefs - While checking your domain backlink profile I see that the top level domain http://5starloans.com has 409 backlinks and 40 referring domains while the url http://5starloans.com/san-jose/ only has 12 referring domains and 24 backlinks. This may be the culprit - dofollow links on /san-jose 23 while dofollow links for berkely is 365 as it is for your top level domain page. The title tag for http://5starloans.com/san-jose/ is also different (title tag is Car Title Loans in San Jose CA | 5 Star Loans)  and doesn't start with 5-star loans as the Berkeley page does the Berkeley title tag is 5 Star Loans | Car Title Loans in Berkeley CA - This may play in, but I still need to know which organic keywords you are tracking. The Moz Chrome tool reveals that the San-Jose subfolder has 1 linking root domain while the Berkeley has 2 linking root domains. Unsurprisingly SpyFu shows contradicting results. San Jose shows an estimated 145 SEO clicks/13 organic keywords/rank 1 for star loans while Berkeley shows 1.38 estimated SEO clicks/ 18 organic keywords/ no ranking keywords on page 1-3. I suggest we have a brief Skype call so I can ask you some relevant questions. My Skype name is Acculytic. Or we can continue the correspondence here, entirely up to you. These are quite inconsistent and if you give me read-only access to your google analytics / search console I can look further. I hope some of this was useful but I do need more info to try and help. dR3pIab WazCkWo YnGWvpv uXDfXbV 8vcKszy OPubEla

Really appreciate this, thank you!

Hello Rodney, From what you can see, have there been any significant changes in your website's rankings to go along with the traffic drop? I have a client who had some web development work done by their team and they accidentally deleted the GA tracking code, leading to an enormous drop in registered traffic but no difference in rankings. If your rankings are still intact, try seeking out the UA on your homepage to ensure it hasn't been tampered with. If it is still there and GA is accurately tracking your data, then you probably have a lingering hack that was sprung after the cleanup occurred. These things can come back to bite you if a code audit isn't performed by a security tech to ensure the site is properly cleaned. The loss of indexed pages sounds like there might be an issue in your robots.txt file or with your sitemap. The last part of this might be an automated Panda penalty, but this is probably the least likely option. During the hack, was there any nefarious link-building conducted that you're aware of? What you're experiencing might be the lingering effects of an automated Penguin penalty (there can be several months of sluggish rankings following one of these). Let me know about the above and I will see what else I can do to help! Thanks and best of luck, Rob

Hello, There are a lot of factors to consider here. In addition to Bryan's excellent breakdown of time vs. reward, another thing to consider is where these pages are sitting in the rankings, how long it might take to put them in an excellent traffic-gaining situation, and what you can leverage out of them in terms of value. In situations like this, if I choose to take action and begin ranking pages, I give myself 6 months to see what kind of rewards I can reap. If within 6 months I haven't seen promising movement of the bottom line, then I move on to a new tactic. Hopefully this helps - best of luck moving forward! Rob

right on. Also be sure to submit the "Change of Address" request in GSC

Thomas is correct.  To be clear are you only concerned about Mobile traffic?  If yes, then it maybe beneficial to reduce your MD's to 120 characters.  That said we test MD impacts on CTR each day and we do not see great differences if at all in CTR unless you put your CTA toward the end of the MD.  The truncation in MD's has nominal effect generally. The first 4 words of the MD have the highest impact on CTR. Recommend you try and ensure the keywords are therein, as they get boldened. Also the mobile Title also displays differently (than desktop) which we have found can make a big difference in CTR if used properly. So also consider extracting increased value from your Title. Suggest use the entire 512 pixels. This is as the final two words of the title often drop down to centre of the page which has significant impact.  On a desktop their value is nominal on CTR. Hope that assists.

Hi there, It's usually a combination of both. The strength and relevance of the domain as a whole is important and usually, the search engines will measure this through a combination of links pointing at the domain and the overall quality of all pages on your website. For example, if you have 1000 pages and half of them are low quality, then that may affect the strength of the domain as a whole. Generally, individual pages are what matters when it comes to specific keyword searches because the search engines want to provide the best result and a result is an individual page. So if your page is most relevant and best quality, it has a good chance of ranking for that keyword. However, if it's a competitive keyword (many are these days!) then the search engine will also look at the strength of the domain as a whole to see if it should rank your page. I hope that helps and makes sense! Paddy

As long as those guest posts are well-placed on respected, topical sites, that could help. You just have to make sure your contributions to those sites are genuinely relevant to their audiences.

Hi Ricky! Has everyone answered your question?

Hi Lehia! Something I recommend all the time is to read through Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts," which covers topical keyword research. It might help you to understand how best to think about your keyword targeting.