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Thanks Dennis!

An adwords ad c/w code appeared whilst viewing YouTube late on Saturday - used it and was ok. Funny thing was, I couldnt find a usable code by searching and yet a couple of days later, it appeared (I assumed through remarketing) through YT ad.

In the top right you will see "MOZ PRO" click on that. This will bring you to your home page that will have a listing of your website. Click the "View" button next to it on the right hand side. This will bring up your dashboard and on the left hand side you will see a menu like this: Dashboard Search Social Links Brands & Mentions Click on the one that says "Search." From there, scroll to the very bottom and on the right hand side there will be a list of the errors you're looking for.

Great answer Garret! Moz Local provides a little bit of a different service than Yext, by updating the core data aggregators that the primary local search engines rely on for their baseline data. While we are not a direct competitor, we certainly do offer a similar service.

Hi there, Both Monica and Max have excellent suggestions! Open Site Explorer (OSE) can show you highly valued inbound links!  Do keep in mind that we can't index the whole interwebz so OSE is likely not displaying 100% of your backlinks. We start from sites with high domain authority, and crawl downward through links that we determine to have high priority. So I would suggest heading over there to check that out! If you feel that you really do need a full backlink profile then AHrefs is a popular service for that feature! I hope this helps, and have a wonderful day! Cheers, Jordan - Moz Help Team

Hi There! Good questions! My choice would be to have a unique landing page on the website for each physical store. Content on this page would start with the complete contact information for the location, preferably encoded in Schema, and followed by a description of the services provided by that store and any other info that visitors would find helpful. Additionally, if some of the services are complex, you could link from these pages to a set of service (not geographic) pages offering fuller service descriptions. This method will greatly simplify your URL structure as well, so that your urls for the location pages would be: mycompany.com/cityA mycompany.com/cityB etc. And your service pages would look like: mycompany.com/serviceA mycompany.com/serviceB etc. There are instances in which a company will build a unique page for every possible combo of service+city, but I would only advise taking that route if you have considerable resources to devote to making the pages absolutely unique and of a very high quality. If you'd be forced to go with thin or duplicate pages taking this route, I wouldn't advise this course of action. For more ideas, you might like to check out: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide Hope this helps!

Sure.

Hello everyone and thank you for your answers. I sincerely appreciate it! I didn’t follow the redesign phase, I’ve just jumped on board now so I actually have no idea why they didn’t go for the 301 solution. As Monica pointed out the 404ed pages were actually valuable pages and, at least in my opinion, this is proved by the fact that now their traffic is close to 0. Their traffic literally dropped in a matter of days (kind of scary to see such a steep fall). I agree with Travis when he says that just the valuable pages should be 301ed, but the thing is that they sell their products online, meaning that hypothetically every (product) page is equally important. They were neither old nor poor quality…I guess they just skipped the 301 step. I will do some more research but I guess that, as you guys suggest, the best way to go is 301 all those pages and see what happens. I have no idea if they did anything on the social side but that’s worth investigating some more. Thank you very much for now! I will keep you updated Cheers

From the example URLs you posted it does count as duplicate content. If you still need to keep all 3 URLs I would look into canonicalization. See here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization and here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html Also I would recommend taking a look at this article http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content Hope it helps

Thank you !

I haven't been seeing a large fluctuation in ecommerce conversion rates for us this year compared to previous years. As you know, it's always about conversion optimization. Improving UX (as Max was stating) is a LARGE part of increasing your conversion rate. So test/measure/implement on a regular basis (part of a continual improvement process). Also, here's a decent article from March: Ecommerce Conversion Rates.

When you say page rank, do you mean Google's Page rank or do you mean Moz's page authority, from Open Site Explorer? If you mean Moz's page authority, that measure should go up, though I don't know how long that would take. You might need to wait till there is another crawl.

Hey Pete, It's a great question, and I'd love it if someone with a case study would chime in here, but I've never seen one done on this topic (would make a great blog post if you had proof one way or the other, huh?). In my experience, I've not seen shared photos between listings have any noticeable negative impact on listings, nor can I see that having unique images has had a positive impact, but as I've said, I've never done a side-by-side study of this or seen one published. The only reason I can imagine for fearing a negative impact of this would be increasing a risk of merging between multi-location business listings, but I strongly doubt Google uses image file names as a differential factor. So, I really wouldn't be concerned about this. I'll also add ... I've been a participant in Local Search Ranking Factors since year 1 and I've never seen this cited as a strongly-felt negative or positive ranking factor. So, bottom line, my gut feeling is that if this comes into play in any way, it is so minor that no one has documented it. Looking at this from a non-ranking perspective, however, we can make the argument that unique photos might positively affect conversions. Let's say your client is a realtor. If he puts the same 5 generic images of houses across every single Google+ Local listing his company has, the impact might be less local feeling for human visitors than if, say, his San Francisco branch shows some of those famous city Victorians while his Palm Springs page shows some classic Mission-style houses. Some industries may have stronger visual queues than others - so there is likely some grey area here. What I would say, in conclusion, is that I would consider Google+ Local photos from a usability/conversion perspective more carefully than I would from an SEO perspective. I know I've seen discussions on fora of how images on Google+ Local pages may influence conversions, but I'm not finding any easy-to-hand. This might be worth your researching further. I hope you'll get more feedback from our community, too:)

As Dennis as hinted we went to https, we saw an increase in traffic and ranking when we swap to https.  We also made sure site speed was rapid as well.

Good to know. Thanks for closing the loop on this.

Thanks very much for getting back to me, Jordan. Yes it does clarify and I hadn't realised I could toggle between domain & subdomain like that. It makes sense now! Have a good weekend

I hear your frustration...been there, done that, bought the t-shirt It's important to come to terms with the idea that PA/DA isn't everything when it comes to ranking. I've worked on sites where the design and conversion strategy is terrible and people were not hanging on the site too long. These sites with higher bounce rates won't rank as well. Another factor I've seen is the continuous updating and adding content (such as in a blog) helps push rankings upward. One of my sites consistently ranks higher than our competitors with higher PA/DA and I'm certain it's these factors that's doing it. There's probably a more techy nerdy answer out there, but this is just based on my experience. If sites aren't ranking well for me, I usually suggest a site redesign and redevelopment. Doing an overhaul and clean up can go a long way. Good luck!

Thanks for your opinion