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Sorry, but this isn't particularly a true statement. They were indeed hit by some rankings drops for their category based pages which featured automated results, however their item pages and pretty much everything else still completely dominate. This is due to a combination of relevance, age of the domain (1995 or so? almost 20 years!!), and the fact that they have such a diverse, huge amount of content on a high authority domain.

I would just make sure your planning and implementation is impeccable. 1. Make sure the person doing the redirects is organized and competant, especially if you have a large number of pages. 2. Make sure that your new sitemap contains all the new URLs, so you can get any new content indexed quickly as possible. 3. Try to come up with a "newsworthy" way of stating that you have made the change. Once you have a really nice article written about the change and how it benefits your consumer base, create a high level press release through PR web or the like for distribution. 4. Resubmit the home page and all linking URLs in webmaster under "fetch as google" 5. See how you can combine tracking data from the old site into the new, so you can keep track of mon-mon and year-year progress from the transition. Thats a good place to start. Other than the basics, content and social shares are going to be what drives in new or additional traffic.

Hmmm. Sometimes it just seems to go like that. And, yes, I suspect Adwords may be the cause. I experience something similar with a certain location based keyword that is ranked #1 and have to use Adwords to get the required clicks. And yet, another similar location keyword we target can achieve the same click throughs at a lower ranking without Adwords.

I have always included targeted keywords such as 'bed bugs barrie' and it has worked well.

Hi Jon, I would say this depends upon the business model. Are these 10 different apartment building with different names? Or, perhaps, some other arrangement? I think it would be helpful if you could explain the business model in a bit more detail.

Dear Gerry, How much of a difference it makes i'm not actually sure about but what I do know: Some of my projects were started on a country domain (.nl). They ranked well, got some nice traffic etc. But on those terms where the competition was fierce it could not beet the competition. Then we build 2 of those projects on .com domain names (which actually is for the USA) and we started to see differences in rankings for the more fierce terms. So domain extentions do matter. If i were you and I couldn't get the exact domain you wanted maybe you could get a different version of that domain name (eg. with -'s in the url or with an extra word in it perhaps?) Hope this helps Regards Jarno

Just FYI, someone specifically asked if canonicalizing a page will prevent it from being indexed last year on Moz. It's was a good discussion. Pay particular attention to what Dr Pete has to say on the matter. Sounds like you have a plan! Great.

I would: 1. Create separate Google+ (business) pages for both entities. You can have one personal account be a manger of both. Get authorship established and linking to the sites. 2. Create separate Google+ business places for each. Even if they are in the same building, see if they have different suite numbers, etc so that you can get both verified. 3. Schema can be added to all pages. Most likely wont make a difference. Also if one of your subpages has the local info on it, it may help them to rank for that specific service. 4. Yes, make the pages distinctive. Don't copy, paste then swap out a few words to make them different. 5. Set up Yelp, Google Places, Merchant Circle, Mojopages, YP, Thumbtack, Foursquare (requires phone and address confirmation. If you do not have a separate phone for each business, set up a cheap tracking line through Tossible Digits) Yellowbook, CityGrid, Axiom (database - will require tax id letter), Localeze, Manta, Kudzu, Facebook, etc citation profiles for each business separately. 6. Make sure all citation profiles have the listing as complete as possible, and treat them with respect. When you write the description for the businesses, treat it like you were writing the opening paragraph for the homepage. Make sure to include who, what and WHERE. That should help quite a bit with your local rankings. Local is pretty easy, as long as you know what to do Again: Yelp Angies List Google Places Yellowbook Superpages Axiom YP Mojopages Localeze Kudzu Manta CityGrid Foursquare Facebook

First off, chicago.yoursite.com is going to be seen differently from atlanta.yoursite.com, unless they are substantially similar (i.e. they are carbon copies). Remember that this means that each subdomain will have its own SEO. yoursite.com/chicago is going to be viewed as the same site as yoursite.com/atlanta because they share the same TLD. Unless you're going to build a ton of content around each, I would suggest one site with a subdirectory. It's less work for you. Then make each localized page unique. Take pictures, discuss the features of each location, etc. Add the address and maybe a map widget.

First, I'd say it is quite normal for your homepage to outrank interior pages, even when the interior page is much more specifically optimized for the term.   Here are some thoughts: Make sure there is a link straight to the Cooking section above the fold on the homepage Do you have sitelinks yet in your Google results?  If so, you can demote any that are less relevant...  and make sure to leave the cooking/baking sitelinks in place.  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en I would focus on adding content in the cooking section.   Beyond posts about specific classes, can you come up with a new page or 2 of general cooking content to add each month? Overall, it appears the site is very new.   A steady flow of new content to the categories, along with the effects of time, should get you the results you are looking for.

Good follow up question and I probably should have mentioned it even if GWMT did not. Yes, if you are a local business use that Schema. If you are an organization use that schema. It will help with your geo targeting. Best

You're viewing this information probably because you doesn't have defined your lang in the html tag. And, also, you can change the lang of the page reading the lang of the client. But this doesn't have any effect on SEO. I think, if you want to be crawled for all the world, you need to get another domain (Neutral one, as .com for example), and redirect all visits who doesn't have user-lang en-uk to these domain. You will mantain your actual score and start to make a new one too. Google normally gives some priority on local market to local domains.

"If I wanted to change my home page URL, (currently along the lines of "http://example.com/home") would it be a good idea to change it to "http://example.com/dallas-auto-repair"?" I have to say no to this particular example. Realistically, your home page probably shouldn't sit on an internal URL like this anyway; is there a reason why the home page is not sitting on the root? If you were to follow this exact example, it sounds like your home page targets "Dallas auto repair", but that there is an internal page targeting "Dallas auto services" as well, which sounds like a good recipe for having internal pages compete against each other for the same type of rankings. We advise caution when implementing redirects: if there is no good reason besides "this would get a keyword into the URL", it's usually not a great idea. If you need to change the URL for a number of reasons, putting keywords in the new URL is a good idea. Say you have long, complicated dynamic URLs that a CMS has created: you'd be best to make these static URLs for a number of reasons. However, if you have a URL like www.example.com/auto-repair-services, I would definitely not 301 redirect that to www.example.com/dallas-auto-repair-services just to get the word "Dallas" in there, for example. 301 redirects sometimes don't seem to transfer the exact authority / rankings from one URL to another, so unless there is a very good reason to go through redirects, I would not do it.

Thanks, William!

Hi there, May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks" By this, I mean conducting a regular download from Open Site Explorer of your links and checking to see if they have increased or decreased in number, what the quality is like and which type of links you'd like to get more of. You can also download your links from your Google Webmaster Tools account, but it is good to have more than one source of backlink data because different services usually show a slightly different picture due to their crawling capabilities, etc. Other services that do this include Ahrefs and MajesticSEO. I would say that if you are going to renew, definitely use a few hours of SEO time a week to get familiar with the toolset and what it can do for you. $99 a month can go a long way if you take advantage of what's on offer, but I agree that it is a waste if you don't use it. The good thing about learning to use the tools yourself is that you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting if you can do a lot of this yourself. Understanding the tools and what they tell you also means that you will be better able to pick good external consultants in the future if you get to the stage where you can employ / contract someone to do SEO for you. Hope this helps! Cheers, Jane

Hi Ben, It's absolutely possible to out-rank the exact match domain, although without seeing the actual examples, it's tough to say what will be needed. Even the DA / PA numbers don't tell me much, unfortunately. Exact match domains have an advantage of sorts, simply because their content tends to be highly relevant to the query / subject matter. You will find, however, that if there are better options available for Google to rank, Google is not married to the idea of always ranking exact match domains first. Far from it. It used to be pretty easy to spam using this tactic, but that clearly didn't provide a good user experience for anyone. For example, if I owned carinsurance.co.uk because I bought it in 1999 and threw up a thin affiliate website on it in 2008, it's not going to rank well for [car insurance]. As it turns out, no domains like this do rank well for [car insurance]. (I don't know who is behind http://www.carinsurance.co.uk/ and I used it as an example before looking at it, I promise.) Better overall SEO - link development, branding, content, social media work (if applicable to your industry and done correctly), etc. all contribute to out-ranking an exact-match domain, no matter how long that domain has ranked well for the query in question.

If you do have links sending traffic, those should be the first to update to avoid the slight but unnecessary burden and delay of a redirect. For Google, though, it doesn't really matter. As long as you 301 the whole site correctly to new URLs and change the address in Webmaster Tools, there will be no additional load time. It's true that you want to avoid big .htaccess files, redirect chains, and inefficient redirects, but that's a rule for live sites. For example, if you were wanting to maintain the domain but move the entire category around, you wouldn't want to add 3000 lines to .htaccess. You should still write a rule rather than going line by line, but it doesn't really matter if it's on an old site that's moving. Search engines will only have to access it once per bot before they get the message and start crawling the new site. In any case, redirects from the old site to the new won't impact load time unless the redirect is happening all the time, which should never be the case in a site migration. Do make sure to get the right redirect rule and check that it's working, especially on your most-trafficked pages.

We have a team of 3 people, located in NJ and do advanced SEO for small to large sites and have more experience than almost anyone you will find out there. Let me know if you would like us to take an initial look at your site.

Thanks for your feedback. Moving everything to one site would be quite a big undertaking. How sure are you that this would make a significant difference how Google would treat the site?

If you go to site settings in webmaster tools you can set your geographic target to United Kingdom which may help.