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Hi Ahead4! Google's local product takes into consideration the concept of an industry centroid - for example, an area of town where most restaurants, insurance companies or car dealerships are located - so I wouldn't immediately think that Google would have any problem with 2 businesses of the same industry being in the same region. That being said, in investigating this, I would want to look carefully at details like the distinctness of each business name, address and website content. I would want to be sure that citations are completely distinct for each business and haven't accidentally gotten mixed up on any of the major platforms. Age is also a factor - if Client A is six months ahead of Client B, then they may have earned six months more of 'trust' in Google's book and their citations may have had that much more time to go live and settle in. I'd also be curious to know, if you are managing both clients, did you build their websites identically (same language in menus, calls to action, etc.) that could lead Google to believe these 2 websites are just cookie cutter templates of one another? Are there other things you might have done that are similar enough to make you uneasy about Google possibly confusing the 2 businesses as being just 1? Content that is actually too close in wording or a link profile that it is nearly identical or a social media outreach that is the same for both businesses? And, of course, a very important question here would be that the business addresses are, indeed, unique. You've explained that the businesses are next door to one another, but their street addresses are totally different, right? As Kayintveen_MD has mentioned, there are many nuances to this situation that bear investigating. I've quickly brainstormed a few here but I am sure there are many more. At the end of the day, though, Google understands that similar businesses are often located in a certain part of town and that, alone, should not be cause for fear of penalties. When you have 2 clients in the same town and industry, only one of them is going to be #1, which is likely why many Local SEOs will not take on 2 clients in the same business and city. You might find this article helpful in your further troubleshooting: http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures

I'd try to get really specific on two things; "traffic" - are you saying only Google traffic? All traffic? if it IS google traffic, did you notice if Google has actually crawled and re-cached the new version on the website? also, does traffic decrease evenly across all pages on the site? or is it limited to just certain pages or sections? "changing themes" - are these theme changes only design / skin changes - or do they affect URLs, internal links, content (such as page titles/descriptions etc) I think answering these questions really matters in terms of figuring out what happened. I think it's very unlikely for just a surface skin/design change to hurt traffic so much - there must be deeper things going on, and it's just a matter of figuring out what the specifics are.

If you're worried about scraper sites--at Moz, there are a ton of sites scraping our blog content, for example--I strongly recommend implementing the rel=canonical tag on your site. Often scrapers grab the entire HTML of your page, and thus, they will grab rel=canonical, which will signal back to search engines that your content is the original content.

It could be, if they made the switch improperly and Google isn't transferring link equity or can't find new pages. I like checking on services like Archive.org to get backing for my ideas, but I think that you should probably reach out directly to your client and ask about their activities in April. Hope this helps! Kristina

Brand + Product, in that order for Title Tag is definitely recommended not only for your SERP, but also to influence the quality of your Product Feed. Usually we do Brand + Product - SiteName. And if there is room, a USP at the end of that too. so: Brand + Product - SiteName + USP is our usual Title tag pattern. It's also good to have some variation on the On Page Title (H1) and make it different from the Title Tag. Usually the H1 is just the Product Name itself, and H2, H3's will reiterate the Brand/Category/Offer, etc.

If you're going through with link removal and building a disavow list, you might as well log all the outreach efforts and results - it really doesn't take that long. Just note when you sent emails, when they replied, what they said, and if the link was removed. I'd upload that to Google Docs and include the link in the disavow file so on the off chance a real person looks into your site, they'll know you did the work.

Hey Autoschieber, There's no manual refresh unfortunately. The Reclaim Links report refreshes with every MozScape index update. So you'll see those changes reflected in the report when MozScape re-crawls the site at the beginning of November.

Hi, Thanks, I will do some testing to confirm that this behaves how I would like it to

I have always preferred in the sitemap because it keeps potential lines of code off your page. Everything helps when it comes to page speed. However, if it's easier for you to put the tags on page, that's is completely valid. Do whatever is easiest to maintain and update.

Its guesswork, I've seen algo updates raise client's website traffic and it sticks - other times it drops back after a week or two. One of the recent patents purchased by Google was essentially to be able to change a websites' serp rank seemingly at random - specifically with SEOs in mind. Speculation says it's to possibly see how the SEO responds to the change - I would assume this is not the case and it's just minor updates that are jumping your ranks. I'd consider it a bonus for being awesome but since it jumped up I would not be surprised if it fell back down - also for no particular reason.

Yes, you should/can, especially for longtail, which may have almost no volume in AdPlanner. I worked for an e-commerce site that had a few people hitting for a certain longtail term, but those customers knew what they wanted, converted at a higher rate, and spent the big bucks. It's also worth noting that Google gets 3.5 billion searches per day (and trending up) and 16-20% of those searches are brand-new, never been searched for before.

Thanks! We ended up having to get Google involved to manually validate the listings.

Hi, First off it would be useful to know which version of Drupal you are using, which modules you have installed to control Meta Tags and the version of that module you have installed. It sounds like you might be running Drupal 7 and are perhaps using the Meta Tags Module (the version - can be found under /admin/build/modules)? The page at /admin/config/search/metatags allows you to set up meta tag defaults for different content types using tokens, such as the node's title, site name etc. However, you should be able override this on a per node (page) basis. Take a look at this video and it will guide you through it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SviVqtAinSk#t=5m56s. If that doesn't help let me know what happened and all the version details and we can explore further watch?v=SviVqtAinSk#t=5m56s

this is where the additional feature of when Moz last crawled a page would be great, but as this page has a PA of 1 and no known links, I would guess Moz hasn't crawled the page / found the page just yet.

To Google, there is not. The R=301 at the end of the rewrite rule defines it as a 301 redirect, so it's practically the same thing. For a one-off redirect I wouldn't use the rewrite format. This is usually for when you need to grab big chunks of URLs and redirect them all at once. Still, if it works this way, there's really nothing wrong with it from the redirecting standpoint. If there was, when people used it for large quantities of redirects, it wouldn't work.

Max, Let me try to clear up this "deep linking" question for you. First, I do not use the term deep linking and am not sure the entire goal of it. If you are going out trying to set up links in some way and direct them to specific pages, IMO you are going to a lot more trouble than it is likely worth today. Your content should be able to get you links. If your "deep" pages have good content they will get links, Period. Here is an example and it is one that for us was really irrelevant content.  One of our people did a post and included something on 3-D printing. We do not own a 3-D printer, I would not know how to use one, etc. Yet, we got people linking to that. Another was about 18 months ago or so, we did it a post on responsive design. The post was done just to talk about responsive design. We did not send it out to people to get links, we did not submit it to article directories, etc. Yet, it is one of our most linked-to pages on our site. The reason seems to be due to the image and people wanting to use it. BUT, we did not set out to get links. I would worry a lot more about ensuring you are creating content regularly and that it is not just content for content's sake. Make it readable, interesting, engaging. If you are "deeplinking" whatever that practice is, you are trying to create links to specific pages and I just think that is a waste of time 99% of the time. Best

Trello for mapping out plans, strategy stage and discussions Coschedule for your editorial calendar, getting writers to follow schedule, assigning tasks, discussions per piece. I hate spreadsheets when it comes to content ideation,creation,launches. LOL