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Thanks Mike, Very informative. You mentioned blog commenting twice. Is it good to do this a couple of days before sending an outreach email

Hi Colin, Sorry for the spelling mistake the first response was off my phone. I have fixed the error (removed the s) in the above answer. I added the same line to htaccess and you can try the redirection for yourself. f4240.com/index.cfm and attached my htaccess as a file for reference. If you are still struggling I would do the following. Comment out all other code in htaccess temporarily if there is anything (comment by adding # at start of line) to isolate the issue. Ensure that there is no additional white space in the line. EG/ no additional spaces at end of line etc If you still have no joy, consult your hosting company as they may block htaccess from functioning correctly. Dan htaccess.png

Me neither, some examples would be great

Have a look at the top of the cached page for all the info you need. However, it won't tell you when they added content.

Do you have Google Analytics running? If so, when did you start to notice a drop in traffic? If there is a rough date, you can often tie this in with one of the many Google algorithms, but there have been limited updates for many months now. You can see all that Google have announced here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Andy

Good reasons, and I'd also add that we could have crawled some different links as well. Be sure to look at your competitors and compare yourself to them. If everyone dropped three points with this latest index release (we had one this afternoon!) then you know it's not anything you did, but it's based on our index.

You are welcome Chris. Good luck and let us know when it starts showing the right way around!

This is normal behavior for a Wordpress blog. If you feel there are a lot of these pages being indexed and they don't provide much value, you can noindex using plugins such as Yoast.

I wouldn't take this risk unless the much-better-brand-name-url.com is an exact match domain of a high volume keyword.  The only other time I would recommend making this change is if you foresee significant investment in brand building, ie. PR or other activities that will actually create a memorable brand.  If you aren't investing in the brand heavily and are more reliant on keyword based traffic then I would not recommend 301ing. Although its not typical to lose a lot of value when 301ing you do stand the chance that something could go wrong and not to mention it's usually quite a bit of work to map out all the redirects. In my honest opinion the return on effort here is not worth the risk.

As far as rewriting goes, you want to pick one version of your site, either www or non-www, and stick with that so that, when you get links, they point to the correct address. When you don't rewrite your URLs, it looks to search engines like there are actually 2 websites, the www version and non-www version, that display duplicate content. I'm guessing that you selected the www version in Google Webmaster Tools because that is the only one it displays. Regarding fixing it, your domain registrar and host will sometimes have a simple setting for that actually so that you don't have to do a mod_rewrite. If you don't find anything with your registrar/host about it, you might be best served by posting a new question here about it. Regarding keywords, that's a tough one, but like many SEO issues, we'd like to think the rules are hard and fast, but they're not. You're not supposed to be able to get by with keyword stuffing – as your competitors apparently are – but it happens. There might be a newer version of this video, but in 2009, Matt Cutts talked about the fact that Google doesn't use keywords as a search ranking factor. watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU

Having semantic markup doesn't guarantee that Google will display rich snippets in the SERPs, it's up to Google to decide whether rich snippets would be useful or not. If it is showing correctly in the testing tool, then the code is fine, it's just up to Google how to display your content. Schema.org is probably the best semantic markup to go with at this point, and it's supported by all the major search engines.

Hi Zac, As you are a single company, I would recommend going with a single website with unique pages for your different offices. Google completely understands that law firms and other local businesses have more than one office and as you are presumably offering the same services in both Austin and Dallas, I don't really see the need for a different website. What will be important is that you have a unique local phone number as well as a unique physical street address for the new location so that you can full participate in the creation of local listings for your new office and not let the Austin location detract from the Dallas one or get 'confused' with it. From all I have read, there is no difference (rankingwise) between this approach: austin.copplaw.com and copplaw.com/austin I prefer the latter, personally, but you can go either way without trouble. I think you will need to do some minor re-optimization of core pages of your website to cover that you have 2 locations and then will need to work on city landing pages. Let me link to a piece I recently wrote on this topic, for situations just like yours: The Nitty Gritty Of City Landing Pages For Local Businesses http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403 Can you go with a new website instead of building out your current site? Certainly, but I prefer the latter because it is: Easier to manage You don't have to rebuild the wheel - you've already built it You need have no worries about publishing duplicate content on a second site By presenting CoppLaw.com as a single entity with multiple offices, you will be presenting your business authentically as an impressive, growing law firm with the clout to operate 2 locations. Hope this helps!

Hi Lisa This is interesting. As far as I can tell, everything is configured 100% correctly. Few questions: 1. Do you keep all images in /sites/default/files/?     Were all (most) of your errors related to items using that path? 2. This could be a downtime issue. Did you experience any availability problems? 3. Do you see any changes in the error report? (different results for the same URL)     If so, this makes my downtime theory more plausible. Also, the site loaded VERY slowly for me. I've run Google Page speed and saw that you have issue with Cache headers (low expiration date that makes it harder to leverage local and CDN caching capabilities) See here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=http_3A_2F_2Fwww.mnn.com_2F&mobile=false&rule=LeverageBrowserCaching This should be looked at. Beyond the immediate ux and seo implications, this can contribute to server load and can be have a negative effect on website's availability. (i.e. the above mentioned downtime) Best Igal

Hi Wayne, There are some good tools out there for what you want to do, but I need to let you know that getting a one box result is not generally a Local SEO goal. Google seldom displays a single result for common queries. In general, what you want is to go for the highest ranking in the local results (the grey pinned results) whether Google is displaying 2, 3 or 7 results for a given query. My favorite local search competitive analysis tool is from 51 Blocks, and it's free: http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/ It's really nice. You may also want to check out the suite of tools offered by Whitespark.ca, especially when it comes to the art of citation building for local businesses. So, the job here is to set common goals (a high local ranking) for specific terms and then create a plan that will typically incorporate a mix of on-page work and off-page citation creation, review acquisition and other factors. Hope this helps!

Honestly, I would spend the time on off-page factors as I do not believe these tags are weighed that heavily anymore. As long as the kw string on these pages seems natural and not "overdone" you should be fine.

Also, instruct Google on the way you want them to handles parameters (in webmaster tools).