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Many thanks to everyone for their comments and help on this. I will def. take all on board and will have a read of your blog post as well Andy. I did see lots of 500, 522 errors in GWT but that could be related to my CDN (Cloudflare) so will investigate that as well. hopefully things will sort itself out. Many thanks Pete

Thanks for you answer. The first place google bot goes is the sitemap, yes, but is it true or not that finding a page in the sitemap and not being able to reach the same page when crawling the website makes google devaluate the page juice? About the footer I would just put a link to each subfolder, so just 3 or 4 links, what I don't know is if small links in the footer are enough to make google bot happy, or if it would still devaluate the page juice of the pages. Since they wouldn't have much interlinkage in the main website.

Hi there, I looked at your site, looks good. I also ran your site through I tool I recently discovered (it might be an old tool but still). http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/reports/www.clickdesk.com It gives you a report about your site looking at coding, social media accounts and reach, localization features etc. It might not be the best software or not a bible of internet marketing but it does give you quite a interesting view on things. I recently solved a lot of problems with different websites which helped me rank better but internet marketing is not an exact science as you just might know. Hope it helps some Regards Jarno

Google has a policy for this - what you're doing is not advisable - you should be annotating the URLs. You can read the correct approach to take here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls

Check the header status. That url is giving 200 header status which should be 404. Resolve this and google will never consider this for sitelinks.

What if you have a client with a LOT of ugly URLs that need to be cleaned up? The plan is to create 301 redirects for every page that we change. But, let's say we're talking about 50+ product pages. In your opinion, is it a problem to make that many changes at once? Would you paste them out? If so, how many at a time? Also, is it a problem to have that many 301's on your website? Thank you!

hi Britney Muller What are you doing so your images indexed well, i have the same problem... thanks

Hi Fiona, Unfortunately, it does not really matter if you set up multiple service areas, you'll still only have a chance of ranking in the city or near the area the business is actually located. (Depending on competition.) And also, since you'll just be moving there, you may not rank well at 1st compared to established businesses that have been there for a long time. The algo is like a giant puzzle and there are lots of things at play that go into the ranking order. Moving can be challenging for your Google ranking, so I'd suggest reading the Moz Local Search Ranking Factors if you have not yet and be ready to start working to increase some of those ranking signals after you move. Using the Moz Local tool to try to either correct or build new citations to the new location would be important too.

It seems to usually take 2 weeks at most.

Absolutely! I will dig into this tonight and give you my honest feedback. Something I did notice that I would make a top priority is the load time of the page/site. Upon opening the page, I noticed it took a quite a bit to load. After running through Pingdom & Page Speed Insights (links below), I'd make the load time fixes a top priority for your developer. Pingdom Test Results Google Page Speed Insights I would jump all over these first and foremost but I will look through the html errors tonight and get back to you!

Thanks, it's a little complicated in this case because some key competitors are able to use the same brand name.

You've made some great points here David! I agree there is no way they built those links last month, that's for sure! And by no means did I mean to imply that waiting around for Google is only course of action. Just figured I'd share the link. It certainly can't hurt! I like the point you made about risk tolerance. Risk vs Reward is all around us in business. I just feel that it could become a slippery slope in regards to following what we know is not best practices regarding website optimization. Cheers!!

HTTPS is one of the ranking factors and is in testing phase. However, in the near future, it might become a vital factor. Since you are going for a re-branding, now is the time to take the decision. Regards

Link wheels are a pretty old school tactic and Google Penguin (links) & Panda (thin content) stamped out the wide-scale use of them. Here's what I'd do in your situation: 1. Report his website(s) to Google, giving as much information as possible. The more information you can collect on the link wheel sites the better: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=en 2. There's no point you disavowing nofollow links to your website as they aren't passing link equity. You should only disavow them if they are followed links - for example if he was trying to get you a Google penalty by making it look like you were part of a paid link scheme. 3. Have a look at the highest quality backlinks his websites have (open site explorer). Chances are he has decent links outside of his link wheel that you don't if he's ranking above you. Take a look at his domain authority to get a general sense of how strong his organic profile is. 4. Take a long, hard look at your own site, content, offering and backlinks and try to improve it. Can you create engaging content for your customers? Can you create a unique proposition that will make you stand apart from your competitors? All in all, despite the frustration I would avoid agonising over any dubious SEO tactics being used by your competitors - so long as they aren't negative SEO attacks on you. If they're willing to take such short-sighted risks then they risk long term harm to their business. George

Hello there, +1 to Bryan_Loconto - thanks for the initial reply while we got caffeinated this morning. Now that us Helpsters had a fresh cup of Seattle Coffee we are ready to go! Krakensigns - At this time we do not have the ability to have multiple users on one account though we do hear your feedback and would love to roll it out in the future. Secondly it seems very odd that that they cannot get into your account with the correct details. I would suggest doing a password reset: https://moz.com/lost-password. If they are still having trouble getting into the account with the email ad password you provide them with please reach us at help@moz.com.