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okay, My 3 URLs are : http://www.acutehomoeoclinic.com/ http://www.siddhivinayakplastomech.com/ http://www.suntechengineers.com/ please check & give me suggestion steps for,, Thanks

Many thanks , I didn't think it looked like something google would approve of. Will stay clear of that idea then. thanks Pete

Hi Steven, As Miriam said, there are so many possible reasons at play here, but one point I would like to make: We have higher domain authority than others that rank higher for the term Remember, that DA is a MOZ score and has absolutely no impact on where Google sees you or why someone someone else ranks higher than you. We have a new website that was launch about 3 months ago Have you checked that all 301's and redirects are in place correctly? I am assuming this was a new site design on the existing domain? -Andy

Hi Andrew, I agree with what Tim and David are saying here ... part of this does depend on how successfully these 5 sites are currently performing for you. The fact that you're pondering this a bit makes me wonder if the sites aren't doing as well as you think they should. I'm having a little trouble envisioning the reason behind 5 sites for a photo booth company, but it's not an industry with which I've ever consulted.. Are the 5 services so distinct that they really warrant 5 sites, or are they all essentially related?

Since EMD updates, we haven't dropped rank at all. I'm aware of the topics on EMD, but it's been great for a certain client in a city the size of 450k. Very competitive KWd space too. In fact, we combined two of the highest searched keywords and made a single domain. The end result: this client gets calls all day long (tracking number) another thing your not supposed to do. This sites been stuck on Spot A in maps and #1 SEO results. Beyond citation done our way and good On page...no links. Go figure....

Hi. Normally changing the content but not the URL via scripts is not a good idea in International SEO. A good example of this use is Dropbox, which geolocalize different languages but does not change the URL of its homepage, which remains always dropbox.com. Regarding Sensacine.com (a site I know well, because I live in Spain), the success it has also in Spanish Latin America is quite surely due to its very good link profile, and surely not to meta tags like: because these kind of geotargeting metas are not taken into consideration by Google, but only by Yahoo! and Bing (and also for them they are not the most relevant geotargeting signals).

Yes, correct - multiple CCS files & javascript will not affect server response time - I think ryan was referring to page load speed.

Hi Lisa, Unfortunately, I can't find any authoritative documentation from Google (or from anyone else) on this since the rebranding of GWT. It sounds like both you and William are seeing the same thing - your pack rankings don't seem to be reflected. So, that's a start, but what I can't come up with is an answer as to whether the tool can somehow be configured to reflect these. I would suggest that you write to Google about this and see if you can get an official response. If you do, it would be super nice if you would share what you learn with the community here, as these are early days and everyone is still in a learning phase with this. So sorry not to have a clear answer for you on this good question!

A strong DA. Are you ranking for those keywords already? or are you building a new page?

If you have most of your backlinks pointing to your main page and have separate landing pages for each venue/region then your main page should rank well when people type in 'magician' and the locale.  You will need unique content on each internal page; you can rewrite the pages to maintain the meaning and use a tool like Copyscape to check they are significantly different.

I do assessments of existing articles by looking at their traffic.  If they are pulling in very little traffic I look at their optimization and see if I can tweak them towards better keywords.   I also look at traffic growth over time.  For my sites a new article might not start drawing representative traffic until it has been on the site for at least a year.

I agree with Andy.  The problem with having two or more main sites is that you will end up diluting your efforts when you might be better putting all your eggs in one basket!  These efforts include, blogging, social media, content creation and backlinking.  Dedicated landing pages are definitely a good idea with plenty of quality chat about offering your services in the different areas.  Your backlinks will be better applied to one site, rather than two, unless you have a huge amount of resources to plough in.

Hey Kat. I'd tend to agree with Andy's response that moving this into one site makes sense. You could then redirect the local pages into the appropriate page on the main site, creating a single authoritative domain. You'd want to make sure as you do this that each local page is truly unique...if the Chicago and Detroit local sites both contain similar pages about a dog safety campaign, you'd want to consolidate those (probably) into a single dog safety campaign page that could work for both locations (or find a way to distinguish the content for each location). Now, having gone through a few projects like these, I know full well that what is best for SEO or UX isn't always the most popular solution. Internal politics play a role, and I'm guessing you might be in a spot where some of the local chapters don't want to relinquish control over their site. So, as an alternative solution you could look for some other ways to link these sites together. For instance, you could have a dog safety page on the main site that all the local chapters can link to and possibly, let the local chapters adjust the content slightly via the link. As in, if the url includes a query sting referencing Chicago (maincompanysite.net/dog-safety.php?location=Chicago), the content on that dog safety page could be programmed to show Chicago's phone number and address. That way you have a definitive page that can rank, but also a way for local chapters to share that content through their domain. A lot of that alternative comes down to content governance rules, communication about who creates what page, a clear understanding of how people link to sites, and probably some clear design/brand standards. It is a bit of a mess, but not an unrealistic reality if you can't convince all the stakeholders in the value of consolidating to a single domain. Hope that helps!

Thank-you Patrick, good information. I appreciate your response.

Kevin From an SEO perspective Patrick and Alick are correct. It makes nominal if not no difference. However from a CTR perspective the pipe is 97/100 times superior to the hyphen. Further you only generally have 512 pixels in the title before it truncates. ie if the title extends to over 513 pixels - often google reverses the title and places the brand first. So every pixel matters and the pipe takes less space. Hence given the high impact of the title on SEO - and every character matters, to me it makes the pipe a winner on a few fronts. Using your example:- Emergency Electrician | Windsor - BrandName = 399 pixels Emergency Electrician | Windsor | BrandName = 397 pixels My conclusion is always use the pipe unless you are prepared to experiment and try and break a strong general rule. Plus you may be able to squeeze that extra letter in, or introduce proper Capitalization so it has a higher CTR. Let me know if any queries on the above.

Start by consolidating everything. Get control of all of the local domains, move the content over and redirect the local domains to their corresponding pages on the main site.

thanks bro for getting back to me. i made so much changes. in site. i made a new one because old one had lots of hidden links from spam sites. it is better and i am using new domain name short one than before. and i redirect the old one to new one now i got a lot 404 errors on webmaster tools. and lost the domain authority and external links. please check www.bassilimousine.com Thanks Gary

Hahaha. I think you might have one of the few instances that I recommend something I generally don't recommend, which is a hreflang across domains. Now this is going to get complicated, so let me know if I miss something in my explanation. First, I normally would recommend that the client just use the English translation of the main site if the content won't change at all. But you can't due to the trademarked name. Second, it sounds like your client never intends on changing the content on the new site for the US audience and doesn't need to. I assume this means that there is no change in products/services and no reason for people to see different content between the France specific English version and this other English version. If there is any change in content, like imagery, messaging, adding, modifying or removing products or services, please let me know. That changes the answer. If there is no actual changes in content, none at all, and no reason for them, you'll want to use a cross domain hreflang. France-French bbb.com France-English bbb.com/en  English (separate brand) aaa.com I would use hreflang to show that bbb.com is translated to en-fr at bbb.com/en and en-us at aaa.com. That's how to deal with that situation, but if their site is a .com and there is some way to just offer their content in English, that will get results faster and be easier to maintain. With the setup you are considering, you would still need to work on promoting the new domain and that will take time. I hope this all made sense.

Hello, This was exactly my approach to this, and I feared it would be over optimization, however my top ranking competitor seems to be using both counties in their H1s as seen here:http://www.leifertlaw.com/ They also have a resources section linking to arguably pretty useful external links in their footer to links with nearly entirely duplicate content for each relevant town in their service areas: http://www.leifertlaw.com/delray-beach-criminal-lawyer-traffic-attorney.html This website's optimization should literally be illegal, and seems to be using tactics that are frowned upon...yet it is ranking on the first page for both our target counties. Should we still avoid using these methodologies?

As a followup to the above, do you have any thoughts on exactly how significant a factor server location is today? I know https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#2 says that it is not a "definitive signal." However, I'm at a point where IT needs to be convinced a CDN would be worth the investment, so I'm looking for a way to quantify the SEO impact of the server being hosted outside the country of your target audience - which I haven't been able to do yet. Has anyone seen any case studies/quantifiable info about this online? I know it's difficult to put numbers to a single ranking factor's impact. Additionally, for geotargeting in the Search Console, today over 60% of the .com traffic is from English speakers in the U.S. We use hreflang tags, but even so, a little over 30% of the traffic is non-U.S., so I would expect geotargeting our subdirectory for the U.S. audience specifically could have a negative impact on the non-U.S. traffic. Thoughts?