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Although Google say you site needs to be quick enough for visitors, there are also times when it doesn't matter because what you have is an experience. There is an increasing trend to build specialist sites that require a bit of initial loading - sometimes as much as 10 seconds or more, yet Google will continue to rank them well because people love them. If you were still on a 9600 baud dial up connection, then yes, speed is critical. But that isn't the case today. One of my own sites takes almost 7 seconds to load, yet I am 1st-4th for a range of highly competitive phrases. As long as the content is worth it, the wait (to a degree) doesn't matter. -Andy

Hi Brant, It's always a good thing to be aware of all of the links pointing to your website. I would look at the Webmaster Tools link data, but realize that it's not necessarily going to give you all the links. I would also look at Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and ahrefs links, as well. If you find there are links that you think are low quality, I would use the Disavow Tool to disavow them. If there is a site that has copied your site, then consider filing a DMCA request with Google and the web host to get the content removed. You might look at your site's log files to see which IP addresses are hitting your site and getting the content and try to block it from happening.

thank you. Vijay

Perfect. Note the #2 item on this list. The key to having international content is treating each country subsite as it's own site. Make sure you have someone from that country consulting you on each country focused site. So if UK, have someone native to the UK review the site. Same for Germany, France, etc. As for structure, my personal favorite is subfolders. So your UK site would be www.domain.com/uk. www.domain.com if you get to the point that you have so many and really need a US one as well, make www.domain.com the "universal" version, and www.domain.com/us as targeted to the US, but it might not be necessary at this point. The content is the big part, if you want to do well internationally, really focus on getting the content right. There will be some overlap, don't worry about that. Focus more on the user experience for people in each area. The only technical thing that needs to be done is for you to geo-target in the respective WMT areas. Does that help?

Thank you Andy and Lynn for sharing your knowledge and thoughts. I will get rel alternate tags implemented with the self canonical of the url as well. Many Thanks

You may find someone else who is happy to provide additional advice on how else this can be handled Francesco, but it is a little outside my comfort zone as it borders on grey-hat and I would hate to be responsible to causing you problems. I'll drop you a quick PM over with something that may help with the re-writing though. -Andy

You're welcome John. Glad I could help. If you want to keep an eye on these, I don't mind setting you a login up and you can track the phrases from my system? Let me know if you do and I will drop this over on e-mail to you. Andy

Hello Anton, The website looks great! It's good that you're ranking good for those keywords. This appears to be your brand name though. I suppose to want to rank for terms without your brand query in it. I can see you have blog posts. I can't find a page with all of your blog posts though. I can only see the last four blog posts at the bottom of the page. Perhaps you could consider adding a link to a blog hub page. Staying on top would be achieved by creating awesome content for your blog, having a good social presence and getting a lot of links and social signals. Since you have a nice portfolio and good blog posts these links will appear naturally over time. You can however speed up the process by reaching out to people who could link to you. Think about bloggers and journalists in you area who write articles on web design bureaus or local businesses. Press releases are rather outdated if i'm not mistaking. I am not sure what you mean about the guest blog posts. Do you mean summerizing several blog posts into one post and posting that on someone else's blog? I would not recommend this since the content would no longer be unique. Check out this amazing article on guest blogging right here from Moz. Tips for staying on top - You seem to have good testimonials. Do you have a Google local page? The testimonials could also be inserted here by your clients. You could still place their reviews on your site manually after this. When you finish a website for a client encourage them to spread out the word about the new website through the media and make sure the resulting articles have a link or brand mention to you. Keep blogging about relevant topics which add value to your users. Consider creating content which could easily go viral such as infographics and awesome videos. This could complement your blog posts in a good way. Make it easy for users to find you on social media channels. At this moment the buttons in your footer don't actually link to your social media profiles. They seem to just refresh the page. Make sure your website doesn't contain crawl-issues by using Google Webmaster Tools Validate your HTML. At the moment not all your pages are valid -> W3C validator test Hope i was of assistance, if you have anymore questions please let me know.

Sarah, I see you placed this question almost a week ago and received no help with it. First, I should say that probably the complexity of it without a url or example.com diagram makes it quite difficult even for those who are very experienced in Local optimization. Next, I saw a red flag from the beginning and I want to be very sure I understand what you have: You have bricks and mortar stores in various locations and you have an ecommerce site that represents all of those stores (my first thought is, like a Costco or other discount warehouse merchant). You have claimed all the locations in Google (you mentioned hummingbird) and have a local/G+ page for each and now, you are slipping in the rankings of the Local (7-pack) or for terms with keyword and geo keyword? (which or both). Now, you want to implement a branch locator on the site and "from looking at other websites with branch locators, they tend to a separate button/page with which you can search for a branch etc. However, they don't have location specific pages." This practice makes you wonder what a best practice would be (correct?) If the find a location link is in a sidebar or header (not the footer as that would be poor UI/UX) it will show from any page. To me, the second question is telling in that you are looking at someone searching for a location who is already on the site. While they will do that, you also must consider those who are searching and see your page in the SERPs. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to come to the site before they find a location? Or, are you fine with them shopping bricks and mortar first and foremost? I would set up each location with a "location" page that is reached from a separate branch locator page that is linked to from the other pages you want searchers/shoppers to be able to find locations from. So, if you sell furniture, I would have a link in the outdoor furniture section, the tables section, the bedroom section, etc.  and all would link to a single locator page where one could input a zip or city, state. (It could even have a list of locations if there are not too many for that.) If the page is on your site and the onpage SEO is around Find A Store Near You for example, there is a good chance that Google will site link that page. (Now, your searchers can choose find a store or shop online.) With the individual city or store pages, I would optimize them so they work for you Local G+ and you will still have the opportunity to rank for non Local SERPS with other pages. The 7 pack is local and the other organic listings allow you more possibility to rank. Remember, typically, a page that is in the 7 pack, etc. will not show in the other organic listings. One assumption I am making is the stores do NOT have their own websites. Hopefully, I have given you enough or provided good questions so that with answers we can assist you further. All the best, Robert

Hi Oren, Thanks for the great explanation. So, let me try to sum up the options I see. Option 1: Legal firm with physical offices in Delaware and California In this case, the firm can have a Google+ Local page for each physical office, linking to a website landing page for each physical office. Be sure, of course, that each physical office has a unique local phone number. In this scenario, the client has good hope of showing up in the local results for the cities in California and Delaware in which they are are physically located. Option 2: Legal firm in with an office California that will send attorneys to Delaware to serve clients In this case, the legal firm can have a Google+ Local page for their California, but not one for Delaware if they don't have a physical office in the latter state. They can, however, build content on their website to reflect the work they do in Delaware cities. In this scenario, the firm has a good chance of showing up in the local results for their California city, but not their Delaware ones. Instead, they must aim for organic visibility for their work in Delaware, and if we're dealing with the legal practice, this can be tough because there are likely to be a ton of lawyer in almost any major city. So, it's possible but very difficult to achieve good organic visibility with this content. Hopefully, I've covered the two scenarios that might apply to your client. It pretty much all comes down to the cities in which one is physically located dictating in which cities one ranks locally.

Also, please check your Private Messages on Moz, I just left you a quick note.

OK Seen Video thanks Wiqas, understand that Rel is a thorny thing. So I am not going to opt for that  Brett thanks! Suggestion is to no index /no follow until it is made unique and concentrate on the most imortant pages first and then submit those bit by bit. Necessary ? Is it more beneficial to remove crap pages than to have them there even though they are indexed albeit at a low level.

I like that idea but I'd consider alternatives to Facebook and 302 temporary redirect the article. When the traffic decreases I'd want to remove the redirect so all of those links and shares benefit my own website, and not another website.

Agree with Travis if you want to go in for social media tags: Here you go for more: http://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123 and here: http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/03/25/social-media-meta-tags-how-to-use-open-graph-and-cards/

"My one suggestion is that you be sure that both cities' pages are accessible from the top level navigation. You mention building a second site within the site." By second site within the site, I simply meant that once you're at the "home page" for the second location, virtually all of the menu links and content are unique to that location. For example, the root page links to Services > Service 1 which is optimized for Initial Location Services. On the Second Location home, they'd be unique URLs/Pages and would not show the initial locations NAP in the footer or anything. "I'm not completely sure of what you are envisioning here, but did want to mention that I think it's important that the pages for both city a and city b are accessible from the main menu." We will definitely have a link to our additional location in the main menu. The home page is a functional WordPress layout for the initial city (which is in the domain name), the menu/homepage will have a link to the additional city (which is the same layout as the main homepage, but with a unique menu and NAP). I definitely plan on having the homepage link to our second location so we can piggyback on the authority/juice of home page. Wesley, Thanks for the detailed and informative post. The only thing I'd like to point out is that I'm not referring to building out pages for service areas (although we will do that for a few of them), but an additional "home page" within the site for a city we actually have a location in. So basically it's quite a bit different than building doorway pages when it's a legit "home page" for our actual location.

Hi Marcus I'm going to just go through a bunch of items in no particular order; Internal links in footer - the anchor "private dental practice in york" linking to the homepage is a little over-optimized.  As is linking to the marketing and web design companies with exact commercial anchors. The actual brand name is a little unclear. Is it "fresh Smiles" or "FreshSmile" or "fresh dental" or "fresh dental smile clinic"? It's super important to have this clear to make a strong brand presence. "Fresh dental smile" and "fresh smiles" don't return a normal "branded" search result with 8 or 10 sitelinks. See this screenshot for an example. This has to be 100% clear on-site and off-site, especially in local listings. The homepage title tag for example is a bit overdone. It should be the main keyword / service and the brand name. Also, "cosmetic dentist" appears in almost every page title tag. You want to avoid repetition, have the titles describe the page well, while fitting in the main keyword for that page. Follow Google's guidelines on titles. For back links, there's definitely some over optimization going on - see Open Site Explorer's anchor text report - and the use of anchors like "dentists in york" "dentist york" etc is a bit excessive. Get those anchors changed to brand names if possible. Believe it or not, there's just too many links in general, and many of them are keyword links. What I mean is - you're not ever naturally going to see 100's of back links for a dentist. Google knows this. So it sends a red flag to have too many low quality over optimized links. I would stress obtaining a few links but of super high quality. Social Media - the facebook feed for example is just a blast of "push" marketing - teeth services, photos and so forth. Very minimal activity in general. They should pick maybe one social network that aligns with where their customers are and use it as a communication medium - a place where patients can leave messages, the office can post fun and engaging things. See Social Media Examinar for plenty of social ideas - I recommend possibly using either Pinterest or Instagram as well. Twitter doesn't make much sense for a dentist. I am mentioning social media because in my opinion it helps SEO. Rel Publisher - even if they're not posting activity on Google Plus (same as the Google places page now) use Rel Publisher to connect their website to their G+ page. Check that its set up correctly with the rich snippet tester Site speed seems poor - here's a test result from webpagetest - note that many of the images (like this one) are taking almost 1 second each to load. You definitely want to try to get those to say 50-75k with some compression etc. Site speed is a small ranking factor as well as UX factor for visitors. The site has a lot of pages indexed for a dentist web site - over 1,000 as you can see here. What I would do is see if they are all getting traffic (check in analytics) - and HIGHLY consider killing off pages like this: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/teeth-straightening-in-york/ which are is a blog post format, designed to just target a keyword and even the image is broken now. There are a LOT of pages like that indexed. Here's another: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/we-also-offer-patients-facial-rejuvenation-treatments/ - this will all seem like thin content for sure, and affect rankings. As you can see, a lot to work on! I don't think any one thing is going to fix the site, it's going to have to be a bunch of improvements. EDITED TO ADD: I would just kill the tag archives. Remove them from navigation and delete them. Check to see if a few might be getting traffic (using my method here) and 301 redirect the few that might be and just remove the rest. I was trying to crawl the site, and it's already queued up to over 1,500 pages - most of them tag archives.

It's my pleasure, Jason. Good luck to you with the work ahead!

Hi Scott, No offense intended. We all run into problems we don't know how to solve. This is pretty specialized - someone who not only knows Bing really well, but also, whether there are issues with their local algo that could result in a branch outranking a main office. It's the Bing part of this that I think makes the question hardest. I feel like I'm pretty good at Local SEO, but because of Google's dominance in this sphere, I simply don't know enough about Bing to have ready, helpful examples for you. Sorry about that, and I really do hope you can get this sorted out. I'd love to hear what you learn.

I wrote a post a couple of months ago which analysed a load of Mozcast data and one of the subjects I touched upon was EMDs and PMDs. Looking at that data I'd say don't bother switching domains. The reason, to quote directly from the post is that "Looking purely at the trends, the proportion of listings with exact (EMD) and partial (PMD) matched domains is definitely going down. A few updates in particular have had an effect: One huge jolt in December 2012 had a particular and long-lasting effect, knocking 10% of EMDs and 10% of PMDs out of the listing" The conclusion was that "if you plan on creating useful, interesting content for your industry then go ahead and buy a domain with a keyword or two in. You could even buy the exact match domain, even if that doesn't match your brand (although this might give people trust issues, which is a whole different story). But if you don't plan on creating that content, buying a keyword-matched domain looks unlikely to help you, and you could even be in for a more rocky ride in the future than if you stick to your branded domain."

Thanks