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There is very clear evidence that accurate citations drastically improve local search results. From a very simple, logical perspective - if the citations are inaccurate (it doesn't match the business name or address) then how would Google know to attribute the search result to your business? Moz local does a good job of explaining why businesses need accurate, structured local citations for the best visibility.

Absolutely! I advise you do this as soon as possible as this will be seen as a black-hat technique by search-engines. No matter how high the domain authority of those websites, it will be seen as highly irrelevant and will be recognised as a technique to manipulate search. I would also look at getting in touch with the webmasters of the websites and trying to get them removed entirely before disavowing them. It takes more time and effort but disavowing can take up to 3 months (sometimes longer) and that is a long time in the world of SEO. Let me know how you get on.

Hi, In my opinion, Google definitely does take certain reviews into account when ranking sites. What I mean by that, is reviews that can actually be measured numerically. These are the two types of reviews that I believe affect rankings: Google + reviews Reviews using schema to markup the rating Both the above can be easily measured by using the number of stars, points etc (which all represent a percentage out of 100%). By using a very simple algorithm, you could collect this information from across the internet and calculate how well on average a particular website (this can also be done for products, recipes etc.) ranks with the public. We have also had our fair share of negative reviews (it has to be expected) and have actively sought to increase our positive ones (honestly and naturally) to combat this. For us, it seems to have worked successfully. What's your opinion on this?

Thanks for all the response.  I implemented the switch yesterday, so as of this morning the whole site is for https.  We already had an SSL certificate for our payment area, so luckily it was not a cost issue.  My concern is primarily the slowdown issue as AltecDesigh mentioned (we only have a mid-range server) and any drop in SERP, since essentially from what I have been reading this is like 301'ing to a new domain. Here are the steps I went through.  Not sure if they are the best option, but there were no step by step instructions yet on google so hopefully this will help people who are planning to implement it themselves. 1) Added the SSL certificate (in case people have not done this yet). 2) Implemented a site wide switch through my .htaccess file using this code: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] 3) Went through the site, page by page with the Google Chrome developers console open.  That help me find any errors.  The most common ones were including images or external files through their "http" address.  Tedious, but easily fixable by simply doing a Replace All on the files and replacing them with a "https". **4) **Reported the domain change in GWT (which to me seems like an odd thing to have to do) 5) That was it.  It took me one day to implement across our site with about 2000 pages.  If it even helps a bit, that will be a worthwhile use of my time. I also had to add a plugin to our wordpress blog since for some reason the .htaccess changes were not working for our blog in a subfolder.  I will try to come back and update the results in a few weeks so other mozzers can see if this worked for me, or if they should avoid it. Thanks again for all the feedback, it helped us make the decision.  In general I actually like this move of Google (unlike many of the others they have done).  Let's see if it makes any difference.

Many thanks for this

Build some links! You have a grand total of zero links pointing to this domain from zero sources with a domain authority of 1 (the minimum, basically zero). I'm not sure why you're worried about your home page showing up when your domain/company is googled right now. I think you have bigger fish to fry. Those types of things will work themselves out as your SEO campaign takes off (ORGANICALLY!) Googling "docslinc" at least brings your domain to the first results. It's an FAQ page, sure, but it's you. Google is in fact indexing your entire site but that may not last long either as you do have some pretty major duplicate content issues approaching... Go to google and search this query - site:docslinc.com You'll see something like 1700 pages indexed and the VAST majority of them are duplicates of sign up and login pages. Examples: https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mjg=&prid=NTI=&tim=MTQ6MDA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0yMg==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1 https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mjg=&prid=NTI=&tim=MTQ6MDA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0yMg==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1 https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mzg=&prid=NTY=&tim=MDk6MzA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0xMQ==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1 (Yes folks, those URLs are slightly different) They are all being indexed separately and that's a Panda Penalty waiting to happen. You need to get rel canonical tags on those pages and point them all to one or no crawl them altogether ASAP. That dupe content issue will not solve your original question, but is very important nonetheless. To be honest I don't think your original concern matters all that much. Just get to building your marketing campaign and the rest will follow. Good luck!

Hi Keri, I agree with your this statement: "Honestly, when people are looking at tools, I almost never hear someone talking about Alexa". Tanveer

Always link by page and subject matter. If you have an article about red widgets, you should link back to the page you have about red widgets. True you can build up your home page with a lot of links, but this hurts your user experience by making them have to go through the entire site to find what they came there for. When you send all your links to the homepage, you are suggesting what page is the most important to search engines. This can often be seen where you have sites that never have any subpages ranking or showing up in search results, only the home page over and over. Sounds great doesnt it? But you can limit the exposure of your site in the long run. By directing links at your subpages, not only do you increase the chance that they will eventually rank higher, you also can get more specific with your linking text. Direct keyword linking to the home page is more risky. With your subpage links, you can get closer or even use exact keyword phrase links because the content is more specific. In reality, use whatever link phrase that a user will click on. A bunch of keywords might not do that job as well as a conversion statement. If you are worried about getting people to your home page, change the way the subpages are set up on your site, so that users can go to the other relevant areas of your site with ease. It should be easy and simple to direct them where you want them to go using graphics or styled text.

Thanks for the responses guys.  Sounds like you both think using location pages is still a good way to go as long as you are not trying to fake having a location where you do not.

Hi! I had the luck to talk with a joomla developer and he gave me a solution that sounds too easy for me. The duplication is generated by the categories.  Therefore we set up all the menu items like index, follow and categories like no index no follow. He said it works perfectly for him. I cant believe it is so easy. I will make a trial and let you know if that solves it.

I don't understand how we'd lose traffic...some visitors would see old site and some would see new site until fully propagated, right? The problem with changing DNS is an initial traffic drop as routers/hubs/ gets the update. Quote REF: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/ Step 3: Change DNS to point to your new web host. This is the actual crux of the matter. First, some DNS background. When Googlebot(s) or anyone else tries to reach or crawl your site, they look up the IP address, so mattcutts.com would map to an IP like 63.111.26.154. Googlebot tries to do reasonable things like re-check the IP address every 500 fetches or so, or re-check if more than N hours have passed. Regular people who use DNS in their browser are affected by a setting called TTL, or Time To Live. TTL is measured in seconds and it says “this IP address that you fetched will be safe for this many seconds; you can cache this IP address and not bother to look it up again for that many seconds.” After all, if you looked up the IP address for each site with every single webpage, image, JavaScript, or style sheet that you loaded, your browser would trundle along like a very slow turtle. If you read this page you'll see Matt Cutts tested mattcutts.com  himself and did not see any major impact. However, Matt Cutts has a high profile domain since he is well known for talking about his experience within Google. The point is the test environment works perfectly right now. If the files are migrated over to the live environment, then we could have issues. But if we simply switch the DNS to the test environment, we know that it will work fine. I would concede this point if the major updates are operating in a different test environment then the live environment. By environment I mean different server architecture, like different php / asp versions or database types/versions that the current live server can not or will not be updated to. When you create a test environment you generally want to duplicate the live environment so you can simply push the test elements live once complete.If the server architecture is part of the test then I can't argue with the logic.

Hi Moaz, How are you specifying the redirect? If you put the redirect in the .httaccess file I don't think a crawler will ever see an HTTP version. I just tested the site and changed the https to http and was redirected so I know client side it is redirecting. However crawlers act differently but will have to follow rules if they are defined in .httaccess RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Thank you!

Thanks guys, I'll take a closer look at the history of site B before making a decision. There's no more data to be found in the WMT since it's almost a year ago, but I could recover a long forgotten GA account.

Hi Fio, What you could do is create an inbound links report in Open Site Explorer, just from the front page and make sure only the internal links are filtered out. After you're exported this data to a CSV you're able to sort the pages by Page Authority. Hope this helps!

Thanks for the suggestion, but I wanted to go with a managed dedicated server that's optimised for Magneto ( So I can concentrate on the website  and not worry about the server being uptodate for PCI etc)

Thanks for letting us know! I went ahead and ran a fix for you in one of our admin tools and everything seems to be working now If anyone else needs help getting their GA connected, make sure to email Help@Moz.com and we can look at that for you right away. Have a great week!

Raventools is great, along with AWR. Both allow anlaytics integration, with easy to understand reports.