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Hey There! This post from Local U might help: http://localu.org/blog/8-tips-optimize-local-knowledge-panel-google-search/

Wow, Garret - that is interesting! Sounds like some type of personalization you ran into, but it's the first time I've heard of something working this way. Really strange. Have you tried to do it again? I'd be curious to see if it happens again. I hope someone in the community will have further feedback on a similar experience, but it's the first time I've seen something like this reported. Curious!

Excellent response. Thanks Michael.

Heads up on this thread > the descriptor has just been given the axe: http://moz.com/community/q/heads-up-on-new-google-local-guidelines

Seems like the safe solution would be to go with separate sites and localize hosting for each as you mentioned. I just discovered Multilingual Press WP plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/multilingual-press/). Looks like it can provide ccTld and ability to manage all through a single WP Site with Pro version. I would lose the potential SEO benefit from local hosting, but efficient management might beat that. Need to dig into this a bit more. Also, WordPress Multilingual plugin (http://wpml.org) was recommended to me for "folders" or "sub-domain" solutions. I need to dig into this more, but I do feel better about using ccTld for each. Thanks for all the help and resources!

Hi there! Good news! All those pesky "pending" keywords are cleared out. You're good to go! Thanks for your patience while we got this fixed, and have a great week! Cheers, Erin

Hi, I like that.  I think that I'll adapt it to insert a nofollow rel into the link in question on pages other than Site A's Homepage. Thank you for your help.

George, Thank you for your feedback. I agree with you that exact match domains are likely becoming less significant, but I thought I remembered from MozCon that case studies, as of that date (earlier this year), proved that EMDs were still resulting in clearly higher rankings. I'll have to go back to the videos. I agree with you about the age assumption. I wasn't stating that the age, itself, was the ranking factor. I meant that because it had been around for so long that natural optimizations were occurring (natural linking, natural content, etc...). This wasn't intentional though. It just occurred through the normal course of business. According to the MozBar, while on the home page, it has a Domain Authority of 19 and a Page Authority of 31 with 266 links coming in from 13 root domains. Thank you for sharing about the Google Webmaster tools restriction. I was unaware of that, but it makes sense. I could see why that would be abused, even though in this case I have a legitimate reason for doing so. I will ensure that clear navigation is in place on the home page. Thanks again George! -Alex

The only danger is if you disavow the wrong links. As long as you are careful not to include legitimate links in with the bad ones in the disavow file you should be fine. Best practices involve doing a link audit and sorting things out, then contacting webmasters about taking down the links, then running the disavow. Given the apparent clarity that this was an external negative SEO campaign I would consider skipping the second step and including a comment regarding your theory on the origination of the links in the disavow file... but I've never tried that. I've only been in situations where the disavow was based on misguided previous seo efforts, so we went through the removal step. Hopefully someone else can jump in on that.

If it is the case that no URL for .us should exist (there are not new URLs) then you can remove pretty swiftly in Webmaster Tools >> Google Index >> Remove URLs >> select the root URL and select to remove all directories that come from it.

Thanks for the response. I have submitted to GWT and done the fetch and render. The site has been live for a few years - but this is the first time that I have started doing work on it for SEO. I will change the tags too. I have just googled the term JL Engineering and it doesnt find the site at all? Any ideas? Thanks

Google's multi-layered multi-algorithm system has come a long way in being able to "figure it all out", yet at the same time, falls far short of always successfully "getting it right". Robots.txt files are no longer an absolute directive.  They're now "just another signal", as are canonical tags, meta robots instructions, and their own Google Webmaster URL Parameters system. Because of this its critical to be consistent across all signals.  If you've got the robots.txt file set to not index pages, but also have inbound links from affiliates, that's a prime example of where inbound link signals can override the robots.txt file's instruction if they're not nofollowed links. While they technically SHOULD not index them after discovering them off-site (because the destination says "index this other version"), that's part of their confused multilayered system. I have a question though - from what limited information you've provided, this example is based on a url parameter of ?ec= When I search Google using site:http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/ inurl:ec I see only three such pages indexed AND where those pages are "fully" indexed.  All the rest (over 1,000 additional URLs), are in the Google system, however every one of those others has a meta description of "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt - learn more." What that means is they are NOT fully indexing those pages - there is no worry to be had about duplicate content for those. Google is simply tracking that those URLs exist. So - is that the only URL parameter you're worried about? If so, it's not a major problem on your site. Except for those few exceptions, Google is doing what you need them to do with those.

Hi Dave, Just add the https version to webmaster tools. Then wait. That'll fix all your issues. The collected data from the old http though wont show in the new one. It's completely normal for that to happen so dont worry. Hope that solves your problem

I was aware that the mobile icon was being tested and was resently confirmed to be rolling out. As such and as per Leonie, you may have not seen it in your browser as only the odd test saw it. Going forward this will likely be visible to all. A bit more can be seen in these posts. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-anti-mobile-friendly-icons-19282.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-smartphone-icon-19233.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-smartphone-icon-15532.html also a bit on mobile friendly ranking factors here https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-ranking-algorithm-19463.html

Hey Oscar! It seems this item slipped through the cracks of Q&A so my help may not be entirely useful now, however were you able to get this sorted. It looks like your campaigns and reports are running correctly again but if this is not the case just let me know and I'd be happy to assist further.

I wanted to update this and let you know we can now track local rankings! See our blog post at http://moz.com/blog/local-rankings-in-moz-analytics to get all of the details.