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Wow - that's a huge impact. It's hard for me to believe this one change would have such an impact, but hopefully these new numbers stick.

Hi, Depending on your configuration some times this is located not in the Yoast SEO plugin settings under title and tags like Wiqas suggested, but it is found on the page where you edit your homepage title, content, etc. It would have the following box on your home page edit screen Hope this helps!

Thanks Federico, Moosa and Keri for your input! I was guessing that's exactly what the responses were going to be, especially Keri's with respect to making sure it's stated that credit is provided where credit is due. I get referencing data, but just copying word for word, even the title of the articles is a bit much, and very lazy. At least change the title to be somewhat unique and summarize the content into your own words, THEN provide the source link for "Read more here....." Thanks, again! - Cheers! Patrick

We actually just put this in the navigation so it should be a bit easier to find now.

Your developer is correct (partially) :). You see, that DOES affects SEO but in a good way. Over time, Google has learned to recognize what's best for the user, and from my personal point of view, having a "lightbox" (that's how that "window" is called) is far better than opening a new page if you can present the property details better. Whatever looks better for the user, then it will also look better for Google. Google is also capable of running and understanding Javascript, therefore you shouldn't have any problem, even less, when the link actually points to the page, so search engines unable to run Javascript can still scrape the site perfectly. Hope that helps!

Thanks for reconfirming what we found out, Takeshi. That is exactly what is going on after we did some more digging. Then we read your response and it all made sense. The #1 page is tied to our main whiteboardcreations@gmail ID which was auto-created when G+ rolled out because of the email account. The #2 page (the one we want to continue to build out and brand) was created as a "Business" page through Google's verification process years ago and then converted to G+ local page. We're going to leave them both as the main local page is the only one tied to our website with Authorship and the one we are posting to and promoting. Again, thanks for your input. - Patrick

Google does allow root domains in disavow, but I'm honestly not sure how they would handle this with a mega-site with unique sub-domains like Blogspot. Typically, Google treats these sub-domains as stand-alone sites (isolating their PageRank, penalties, etc.). I tend to agree with the consensus, that the best bet is to disavow the individual blogs, and not the entire root domain. If you're really in bad shape and you have much more to lose from Blogspot links than gain, you could disavow the root domain, but I'm not sure if anyone has good data on the potential impact.

I'm going to leave this as status "Unanswered", as I don't think we are much closer to any substantial conclusions on to what extent a non-generic ccTLD influences keyword matching for the country name itself. Based on my own non-scientific searches for various countries and terms like "hotels", "conference venues", "events" and so on, I've found > 50% of first page results from the relevant ccTLD without those sites keyword stuffing the country name into their URLs, so I am going to omit the country name from the website structure itself and stick with a structure of http://mybrandname.ccTLD/service/

Hi Courtney, I support the sound conclusion you've reached. As the marketer on the project, hands-on nearly always beats automation. Whitespark's service is terrific and if you're using that and hand building citations for your clients, they have an edge over other companies who have taken the automated route, simply because someone (read: you) has maximum control over their citation profile. Great responses on this thread.

So interestingly enough, and without trying to identify the people involved, I have found a local SEO company that has somehow acquired a fully unrelated domain which supposedly used to have something to do with students and kids lives and was a resource of sorts back in the day. This site has FOLLOWED backlinks (with the student resource context) from the United Nations, from cbs.com, and from a wide range of websites mostly referencing it as a student and kids life resource. Given the looks and feels of their site, they seem like a shabby SEO company with rather grey or dark themed SEO tactics. This company ranks on page 1 for City+ SEO combination of keywords for three to four MAJOR cities in the US. I want to find out what you all think of this... Is this ok? How is this ok? Is this going to cause them to be flagged eventually automatically for a penalty or purge? Does Google have anything against this sort of thing at all? Danke

Hi there! This depends on your particular needs, but I would suggest blocking those query parameter-containing URLs in robots.txt. If you think it's important for search engines to crawl them, you could just block Rogerbot, and you shouldn't see duplicate content warnings about those pages anymore. Personally, though, I'd block those URLs entirely.

I was thinking the same as we have 4 categories /products /services /about and /projects

Thanks, I'll try do that the messy is worse than I thought...

In deed, both options are valid Option 1: www.oldsitestructure.com/about_us/success_stories/custom_vinyl_banners Stick with current URL Structure is fine. It's SEO friendly as well. Option 2: www.oldsitestructure.com/about-us/success-stories/custom-vinyl-banners There is no real issue with this structure as well. Just redirect Old URLs to New URLs (Must Use 301 Redirect) and juice and authority of old URLs will be transferred to new pages. Within couple of weeks, older URLs will be replaced by new ones in Google Results. Simple is that Regards