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I think that now a days, with many sites using reverse proxies (such as CloudFlare) Google has stopped looking at the IPs as it is no longer a factor to rank sites. Jeff's point on the e-mail problem is right, however, you can simply host your email on a third party IP, like Google Apps, and never get blocked. Something that even dedicated IPs get the punch. I have a few dedicated servers, some of them with multiple IP addresses and I found myself trying to clean new IP addresses that just were to new or "abused" by previous owners. Switching hosting provider, however, while changing the IP address may increase/decrease rankings not because of the IP but most likely because of the site speed, which IS something that Google considers to rank sites.

Thank you.  These steps are a part of our process.

Hi Jen: That is very helpful, thanks!! The one point I did not understand is the last one one regarding checking to see if the c-blocks are varied. Could you please elaborate. Also, do you think it would be risky for me as an amateur to do this on my own, that link removal would be better left in the hands of a professional? I am working with a reputable SEO firm, but they are requesting almost $3,800 to identify and remove approximately 225 domains that have toxic links to my site. If I use a professional SEO firm I would probably want to conserve my resources for link building ($2,500/month). But I don't want to be penny wise and pound foolish. So do you think I could disavow bad links on my own? Also, would you suggest any software of tools for doing so? Thanks so much. Alan

The rel="canonical" tag needs to have the URL that you wish to be the primary designated URL. This tells the search engines only to index this version of the URL and no other versions, and it also tells the search engines that links to other versions of the URL need to be counted as pointing to the canonical version. So if your page is www.mysite.com/boats.php and you use www.mysite.com/boats.php?utm_medium=adwords, etc. then the canonical tag should be set to www.mysite.com/boats.php so the search engines don't bother messing with the URLs with the parameters in them.

Here's the rankings I'd give on relevance: "Cleaning Marble Floors" - highly relevant, but probably too restrictive to continually create decent content. "Anything Related to Marble Floors" - just about right. Relevance is high in terms of search engines and your readers, and you're not getting too far away from the topic of the business. "General Flooring" - OK, but probably too broad if cleaning wood floors is irrelevant to your business. "Home Improvement" - Way too broad for the type of site you're running. As far as finding writers, I'd avoid most of the content that you'll get for under $25 for a blog post. It's going to be poorly researched, and probably poorly written, too. Start with networks like Zerys or Skyword and look for writers with experience with construction/flooring/marble.

Miriam, you are a rockstar!  I just want to add my two cents. Most citation sources find your listing by phone number so putting more then one phone number per location will generally be rejected or merged by those sources.  I strongly agree that each of your locations should have a separate number.  Your NAP (name, address phone number) consistency is also a ranking factor.  (Here is Miriam's post about local seo ranking factors http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide) If you are building citations for each of your doctors, I recommend separate numbers for them too (but it's not required).  I use a company called ifbyphone.com.  They have a basic service plan at $49 per month and $2/month per phone number plus minutes.  You have them forward to one number if you want but it's a good way to get around the issue.  That's about $200/month plus minutes but you can use these numbers for multiple things like marketing too (ie AdWords, Billboards, Radio Commercials, etc) That being said, Google Maps said "Some doctors may share the same office address with other doctors. If the listings have different doctor names, they are not duplicates, even if they have the same phone number. The same goes for lawyers, insurance agents, etc."  https://support.google.com/mapmaker/answer/1731387?hl=en The reason I recommend different numbers is for third party citation sources.   If you can justify the $200 per month expense, I would highly recommend using separate numbers for each doctor.  You'll be able to build strong rankings that way.  I always worry about Google changing it's policy in this area so I think that separate numbers is a better idea.

Just as Miriam points out, ranking in the local map pack will be tough outside your specific location, but local content pages can rank and bring leads. I'd consider using blog posts or a project showcase to create location specific content that is outside the main location you have.  If you title a blog post "Cityname Kitchen Remodel Project" and maybe include other niche keywords you can create great content for a prospect as well as search visibility in other specific areas. A solid post or project showcase page with a text overview of the project, bulleted list of products used, before and after photos, are all great content additions to the site.  Go a step further and create a video recap of the project that can be placed on the page as well as added to YouTube and optimized there can create an additional opportunity to land in the SERPs for a local search.

As long as you have the canonical tags set up correctly, then you don't need to do anything else with the URLs that have parameters in them. Google will eventually start dropping those URLs from their index.

Thanks Alex, that is definitely something I'll have to look into. All pages are translated by hand.

I want to start by agreeing with everything Alex has said.  He's absolutely right. To answer your question directly, I would think nofollow should be used when the blogger writes the review.  If they mention you and link to you in later posts, that's their editorial choice and those links can be followed.  Technically, if the blogger mentions/links to you in later posts, you don't really have anything to do with it and it's their choice whether the make the link followed or not.

Sure - I can confirm this behaviour because we`ve experienced it already. Google is very anxious to show content which is closely related to the country of origin where a user starts the search query... but what you describe there will take some time to show up... but by the way: I am not sure if your efforts will be honored that much by Google... it`s a little step and the impact on SEO might by questionable according to the time you need to make these changes?!

This is the current flow of redirects: 1. northamericahvac.com -> (301) -> 2. www.northamericahvac.com -> (301) -> 3. http://www.northamericahvac.com/servlet/StoreFront Assuming you can't fix the /storefront redirect, I would point the links to the www domain (number 2 URL) as that's your canonical domain (the non-www domain redirects to it). It's nicer to look at and there's less chance the URLs in backlinks will be spelt incorrectly than if you were linking to /storefront (number 3 URL). It's also likely to be the domain you will end up with once you fix the platform issue. In practice I'm not sure it really matters which domain you point to, as your 301s are set up properly and your /storefront URL will be appearing in SERPs as it is. If you did migrate from the number 3 URL to the number 2 URL in future then you would have to set up a 301 in the reverse direction anyway. George @methodicalweb

Great thanks Tom, clearly a develpment i missed!

I think you did the right thing. Engines will take a while until they re-crawl your robots.txt and actually following what you commanded. Extra steps I would take: 302 the redirect, probably is just a line of code doing the redirect after setting some cookies or session variables. Try to edit the affiliate codes to work with Javascript instead of naked URLs ( could be something like <ins class="affiliate">that is later switched to a text link or banner using JS). This will not only allow you to set a nofollow for those links, but you could be able to remove/block specific affiliates or pages where you don't want your links/banners.</ins> PS: have you tried fetching your robots.txt from Google WT (Crawl -> Blocked URLs) to see when was it downloaded and id the contents are ok?

Not quite London, but not too far down in Brighton: GlobalMaxer - they're a pretty boutique agency with a good MVT that you can use by yourself with relative ease, or combine it with their CRO/MVT consultancy. Worth giving them a call as they're often in London and can run through a demo with you.

Uglier  URLs is not the end of the world, I personally was able to rank clients websites with very ugly URL like, site.com/238313 However once your new site is under development why don't take the time and implement the clean url? I'm a sure a clean url will help with SEO and also is much better for usability.

Karen - So, I've taken a look at the site, and it looks like: 1. The site loads quickly - 1.29 seconds, according to a Pingdom Website speed test. To me, this means that your hosting is fine, and that you don't have any problems with the user experience, or how long the images or other assets take to download. 2. The home page has about 825 words of content.  This might be an area to increase the content, perhaps.  You do seem to have seven images on the home page that don't have ALT tags on them.  This is best practice, and while you shouldn't try to stuff keywords in them, you're raising a red flag and missing an opportunity. 3. Your site has a 33 domain authority, and the home page has a page authority of 43.  You have 5,061 inbound links from 92 root domains. Your site has 1 facebook share, and zero likes, and 0 tweets and 0 Google +1s.  I think from a social media signaling perspective, your profile needs more inbound social media love to rank better. 4. Here's more technical information on what a search spider simulator found: Access and Status search spiders are not blocked by robots.txt Status code after all redirects: 200 0 Redirect(s) Title Outdoor Blinds Perth | Patio Blinds | Cafe Blinds | Bozzy Shade Blinds Title length is about right Meta Description: Bozzy Shade Blinds - a leading provider of outdoor blinds, patio blinds, cafà blinds and shade sails in Perth and WA. The description length is about right, but watch out for the illegal characters. Key words The words shown below should be words that make sense for your webpage content: blinds - used 45 times on page outdoor - used 18 times on page shade - used 12 times on page bozzy - used 11 times on page Links The tool found 104 total links on the home page of your site: 48 unique links 38 unique internal links 6 unique external links 3 links not counted (href='#' or 'mailto:' etc.) 24 image links 0 nofollow links - (listed below if present) My $0.02: There may be too many links on the home page.  According to the "Feed the Bot" site, this might be normal for well linked to major media/news sites and online retailers. [But] if you aren't famous and you don't have a lot of links to your pages this is probably too many links. You are likely confusing users with too many choices and may appear to search engines as spammy. If you have legitimate reason for so many links, you may want to organize your site better so that there aren't so many links. You also need to work on better social media sharing to increase your presence. Also, it looks like the domain was last modified today (12/30/2013).  I'd recommend renewing it out a couple of years...