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While you may not be able to compete directly with the big dogs immediately, you aren't doing yourself any favors by sticking pages you wish to rank deeper inside your site. Even though the content may be more specifically relevant, the reality is that once you are targeting traffic on a national scale, you are probably looking at your link profile as the defining factor of success rather than your content. Content still retains power in terms of generating relevancy, but link building is what you need to compete with those long-standing enterprises. In my opinion, content location is secondary in this situation. A better way to go about this might be to run some competitive analysis on a wide range of keywords to determine: a) Where are your customers coming from? b) What are they looking for? c) Where does your competition rank? d) Why are they ranking where they do? Once you can answer these questions, you have the ability to make a strategy that will work regardless of where your content is located. Additionally, adding more pages will just make work for your web dev team without any discernible increase in your potential rankings, and will take time. Given the size of your site and the variety of products you carry, this may be an ineffective use of time when you might just be building a significant link profile to a couple of major landing pages. Whatever you decide, learning why your competition is succeeding needs to be your priority. Then you can decide on a content-driven strategy or a link building strategy.

Hi Thanks. We do canonicalise sizes though not colours as the colour can be an important search term..

Hi there! I suggest reading through this blog from Moz: https://moz.com/blog/are-coworking-offices-eligible-for-google-my-business-listings While the main topic of the article is coworking spaces, it also addresses virtual offices and how this impacts your chances of ranking in the local pack. In the article, it says: Virtual offices fail to meet Google guidelines, including: Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location. Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. Provide your regular customer-facing hours of operation. If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours. Hope this helps!

Crawl stats are improving if anything. The last few weeks our pages crawled per day increased and our total indexed pages has steadily been increasing.

Thanks Alick300, It's interesting to hear a mix of view points. In my industry (cloud software) it's more commonplace, and as @Robert Cairns states above, it can work well. As with most areas of digital marketing, I think I'll tread carefully with a test and learn approach

I love Robert's advice.  I would also suggest adding some long tail keywords. Finding a church is very personal and I'd guess that lots of your prospects are searching things like "Bible based church" "church with active single group" or "church with great music".  Don't put all your emphasis on generic phrases.

OK, so if your homepage is completely deindexed, then there has to be a technical issue or a manual penalty. I'd say that a technical issue is much more likely. To look for a manual penalty, go to Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions. If there is nothing there, then I'm happy to take a quick look if you want to PM me the url or better yet, send me an email at marie at marie haynes dot com.

The domain which I used for redirection having following matrix Total Backlinks : 7.5K DA: 18 PA: 38 Spam Score: 0

The homepage will likely always be the page on your website with highest domain authority. While there are situations where this might not be the case, the homepage is likely the be the page that has the most backlinks (don't internally and externally). That being said, I don't think creating local landing pages for multiple locations would harm the keyword rankings for your homepage. Instead, this provides an opportunity for your client to dominate the search engine results pages and take up more than one of the listings. As they build out these localized pages, I would spend time focusing on both the geo-targeted keywords, but also building authority for these pages. Are there any local organizations, associations, teams, etc. that would link back to the localized service page? As Julie said, your homepage is going to do the most work for you. But utilize these landing pages to enhance the results!

As I think if you have a Business website then the Product FAQ at the below. Because if a Person looking for a Product, then it finds the faq on the same page will help you to grow your sales as well as reduces the use of Email Support or Call Support.

Thanks, Jordan.

Google left us in "confusion world" and making money. First, does anybody guess what is good or bad link as per Google? No. May be very less SEO experts; that too after using expensive tools. Google agreed that they "try hard" to stop the negative SEO affect; but cannot guarantee you that no links hurt. So it implies that Google algorithm is never going to be accurate even they update with Penguin or Peacock. That too it'll be more less accurate coming to websites like us with thousands of backlinks where hundreds and thousands of new clueless backlinks add every month making it hard finding the culprits. Wikipedia page is sure a strong hit. Wikipedia page is not a feasibility every company but only for which holds some genuine reputation can get a page and backlink. So, even it's a nofollow technically, Google gives a weight to it. One of our sub-domain is hitting with backlinks from same domain for last few months...all added up to 5k links...mostly from comments. Do we need to worry about this hitting our domain and website rankings?

Spam score can be a useful adjunct when helping you decide which links to disavow, but you should never make a disavow decision based on spam score alone. The disavow tool should be used by site owners who have a huge problem with unnatural links. If you know that this link is one that you yourself made for SEO purposes alone and that you have lots of links like this, then yes, you should probably disavow it. But otherwise I wouldn't be too concerned.

I don't think Google penalises it. We can see # sign in many meta titles to promote they are number 1 in their sector. Like they add "#1 software for xxxxx". Even I tried it and I don't see any negative impact. I guess sings might be ignored but don't cause any drop.

Of course, you've acquired the domain and not the old site; that makes sense. If I was desperate I would consider scraping what content I could from cached versions of the site (I'd outsource that)- if there are no legal implications in doing so. If that isn't possible/feasible, I'd direct what you can to the most relevant pages where possible and take the hit. I think your plan to create matching pages for the top 50 pages is sound. Whatever you do beyond that with 301s is of limited value if you can't match the content so in that case, I'd consider saving some time and creating redirecting everything else to your home page (or product overview page, for example, if this is of greater value and has higher engagement potential). The best you can do in each case is match as closely as you can to the content on the new site, where that isn't possible, consider the user's experience - can you deliver them to a page of interest where you can engage and potentially convert them into customers? You should always but the user's experience first, as this is what Google values most. After all, they want to do exactly the same for their customer - deliver relevant and engaging content. Worst case, if you've captured the biggest chunk of the value with those top 50 pages, you're going to salvage some value, at least. Consider the rest a bonus. Good luck

I would focus on the overall Information Architecture, and lay out the content in a way that makes sense for the people reading the information. So, in that sense I think a one page site is appropriate for what you describe. You can work on building backlinks to improve the SEO, as well as ensuring the freelancer is listed in local directories, social media, et al., plus doing other types of marketing.