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Rachel, All the links going to /autos are telling Google that the page is valuable. Changing /autos to a landing page is then telling search engines that the landing page is valuable but it will require some work to gain some page authority. A link from this page will not bring as much link juice. However, A link is usually more authoritative than a redirect. Changing a redirect to a page might lose some juice. I think the best solution is to create http://billingsgazette.com NEW PAGE NAME and use it as your new landing page, fill it with great content and link it in the menu with the old anchor text "Autos" From this page, you can add a link to http://billingsgazette.com/autos using some cool anchor text. I then recommend that you add a link DIRECTLY too http://www.montanawheelsforyou.com/ at the bottom of the page in Sites & partners with the anchor text Montana wheels.

Hey Jeff, Good feedback from the community so far! I just thought I'd add ... you are in a tough market, because you are not a local business nor are you yet a major directory (like YP or Yelp). Have you looked at the other directories that are doing well for your core terms and assessed why they are outranking you? Age, links, content ... these can all be factors. I noticed the URLs for your pages aren't the best. They are https://www.wellpdx.com/naturopaths rather than locally optimized like https://www.wellpdx.com/naturopaths-portland but it may/may not be worth it to change these now. Best thought here is to keep your head down and work like crazy to build better content on these topics than any other competing directory can boast so that your site eventually becomes one of the top, authoritative sources for this information in time.

My Link Profile Competitors Link Profile Thomas thanks for taking time to offer suggestions I appreciate it. avr2IsB R2l9h2r

Hey Thomas, By a happy coincidence, I just happened to write a blog post on this here recently: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages Hope it gives you some new ideas!

The static page examples are now 404 so I can't see those ones - I didn't notice a redirect before. But the parameter pages redirect. The parameter page is still being found by Google though and if it continues can easily be fixed in the Search Console settings.

K Andy is correct. The practice used by your competitor is outdated and against google guidelines. From our experience we often see (looked at one last week) exact matching domains rank highly without any other metric being strong or comparable to competitors. However it is counter intuitive as if you were today to buy an exact matching domain and then expect it to rank well without hard work - well it simply does not happen anymore. They seem like relics, and panda updates have passed them, likely thin content as well. For some reason often exact matching domains that breach google guidelines still rank well - in my observation in low competition spaces. Your examples are all local.  The key is not to attempt any bad practices, even though they are ranking for them as it will hurt your site. So in answer to your questions. 1. It is not good technique - in fact usually penalized. 2. content spinning is not a good technique - in fact usually penalized. You have an awesome opportunity.  One dedicated site with a single site approach. As distinct from his 4 sites. All work undertaken on your site (Creating unique content, testimonials, obtaining awesome links) goes to benefit all of of your store locations at once, if your site is well structured. Your website obtains maximum 'juice' out from your hard work and the site authority strengthens over time. You can smash those 4 sites with a bit of work. Hope that assists.

Hi Blake, What I'm suggesting with those links is that you need to do a thorough analysis of any competitor to discover whether their high rankings are a case of geography, organic strength, reviews, citations and a host of other factors ... or, if the pack in question has been spammed. If the former, you then know what the factors are that are contributing to rank and can identify which factors (if any) you can target to surpass the competitor. If the latter, then you can always report spam to Google. There are believed to be several hundred factors that contribute to rank, and a Local SEO or local business owner who is feeling astonishment over being outranked by what appears to be a weak competitor needs to sit down and put the time in to discover whether these high rankings are the result of strength that Google is responding to, or the result of spam that Google is failing to catch. In the scope of a forum, it's not likely that a community member is going to be able to take the time to do a full competitive analysis for you, so I'm hoping the links I've provided will get you started on doing one. I totally get how frustrating it can be to find your business or your client's business in this scenario of being outranked, but fortunately, we can use skill to divine the probable cause of this outcome and, hopefully, figure out how to overcome any issues, whenever possible. Hope this helps!

Lessons: Sometimes you need more than 1 landing page even if it's for 1 service and even if you only serve 1 neighborhood. Why? If you know your target audience and it's mixed it will be more likely to convert with more personal landing page rather than a general message for all of them. Don't be afraid to use different CTAs and more than 2 times. Again, it might vary, but if your page is well designed and has some good flow you can use CTAs (I had "pre-conversion" CTA to get emails and also conversion CTA). For some people it's enough to read about your brand and they will convert, for others - it's important to know how you do it - then they convert/pre-convert. Having CTA in front of their nose helps, but of course don't overdo it. Mobile first. Always. 60-90% of all conversions came from mobile. CTR is higher, and CPC is lower. I don't know why, but it happened many times with different local businesses.

Hey There! I recommend that you get the landing pages straightened out before building citations. You don't want redirecting URLs on them and you don't want to have to do the work twice. Hope this helps

It looks like the links were on the pages when Moz' crawler crawled them, but have since been removed. The site you link to above mentions that they're having some WordPress problems, which is a clue. What I suspect happened is that links to your competitor's site were part of some kind of link injection malware that was abusing some exploitable WordPress feature common to comics blogs. Often when a bot is injecting links to a bunch of sites onto vulnerable pages, some of those links will be the bot's "customers" - that is, people who have paid for their links to be put on a bunch of sites and aren't too picky about how they get there - and some will have just been pulled in to the mix so that the spammers can mask their client list. So it may not be that this is something your competitor was doing on purpose; it's hard to know for sure. Either way, it's far more likely to be bad news for their site than good news, but probably just won't have any effect one way or another. Since the links aren't there anymore, it's likely that the site owners caught and fixed the bug so those links disappeared. If this was happening to your site, I'd recommend disavowing the sites in question and keeping an eye on your backlink profile for future weird links like these. Since it's happening for a competitor's site, though, you can just ignore those links entirely and focus on the backlinks of theirs that are actually relevant that you might want to pursue.

Rob, generally speaking, creating pages or sections of your site just to target certain cities is not going to get you anywhere. Those typically are going to be considered "doorway pages" and violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines. What we typically recommend is being honest with the location of where you are, posting that location/address on your site, and using Schema.org markup to the search engines where you're located. Then, using Google My Business (Google maps, etc.) to set up your local business listing is key. I would also consider working on local citations in order to get more listings for your business, as well. Since you're a photographer, using social media such as Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook is going to be key to driving visitors to your website, as well. Google is watching engagement on the social media sites, and that typically helps your site's search engine rankings. When it comes to Yoast, we typically use it for on-page changes only, such as optimizing the title and meta description tags. If  you need to redirect pages, you might consider a separate WordPress plugin to do that. If you're having trouble with duplicate pages showing up, then you may need to delete the specific duplicate pages and wait for Google to re-crawl your site.

Yes, I've removed all the "shortcuts" of bad thin content now. But I'm a little confused by your comment: But anyone who looks closely at these cookie cutter pages will see that  the wording is awkward, the photos don't match the names or the colors listed, and problems  like Oren & Bar Mitzvah sneak in. Do you see something in particular that is bringing this to your attention?

Hey Alex, Exciting to work with a new company! As they are new, I would suggest: For the first X number of months, you focus solely on Vancouver-related content. This would include basic info about the company and its products/services + an on-site blog where you'd start writing about Vancouver-oriented topics relating to your smoothies, health, convenience, customers, etc. Once you've got this rolling well, then, I would say you could perhaps split this 80/20 Vancouver content/national content. So you'd continue to focus largely on Vancouver, but might also write some posts that would be of national interest whether they particularly apply to your city or not. This might be things like 5 best fruits for better skin, 5 best vegetables for better digestion, 5 best smoothies for a chest cold (by the way, the answer here is pineapple/almond milk) etc. These posts, if good enough, could earn wider interest in your brand, and as EGOL mentions, possibly pave the way for future expansion of the business beyond Vancouver.

Hi Chris, I appreciate you giving me the feedback on my site issues.  I've rectified a few, and will thoroughly go through my site to ensure it complies with the suggestions. What is the likelihood that once Google sees that the page is cleaner, will my site jump back up to the top?  Does the PR3 still factor in SERP? Thanks!

It is definitely possible to maintain two separate websites. It sounds as if they don't do the same thing, so technically the content will be different. The websites use a different template, and from what I can tell they don't have any duplicate content issues. Since the sites are related, it would be natural for the two websites to link to each other. But you don't want to run into any search engine penalties from having them link to each other. In order to do that, you'll need to make sure that the link profiles of each website are completely different. What I would focus on is the links to each website, and have a plan to acquire good, trusted links to each of them. One is product related, so you'll want to focus on where you can get your products listed. The other is a service type business, so getting the site links that are appropriate for that site would be helpful.

I agree with Miriam.  Make the franchisee write the content for the site.  Make unique, substantive, website content part of the franchise agreement.

It sounds like you are already doing as well as you can - since there's no clear canonical page, noindexing the duplicate pages would probably be the way to go. Don't panic if you see some duplicate pages still sneak into the index after you've noindexed them; this is common and it's unlikely that Google will see this as a Panda-worthy problem on your part. The one drawback to noindexing the pages is that when unique content is up on them, and they are ready to be indexed, it may take a while for Google to get the message that this page is supposed to be indexed now. I've seen it take anywhere from an hour to a week for a page to appear in the index. One thing you can do in the meantime is make sure each site is accruing some good links - not an easy task with 80 websites, I know, but the higher authority will help out once the unique content is ready to go. Sounds like a herculean task - good luck!

Hi Vernon, to answer your questions... I prefer to put review Schema markup on the home page since it's likely to show up at the top of a branded SERP. There's no telling how Google will use your data. I've seen this Schema work and not work, with no rhyme or reason. Yes, you may embed the AggregateReview within the HomeAndConstructionBusiness tag, but it's not necessary. You can do something as simple as this: Hope this helps! Brodie