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I totally hear where you're coming from. Unfortunately, I don't believe this is a feature our system will allow us to support. I'll make sure to mention your feedback to the team, though. If it were possible, it would be a great feature to include.

Hey Armen, It can depend upon how you have it structured and what type of schema mark-up you have in place. Is it an aggregate review for the business or product as a whole or individual review from a customer/testimonial?. Also just because it the review shows by page for other search queries this does not mean it is broken for branded search to the homepage, Google kind of has the final say on if it chooses to show the snippet. Sometimes it might, sometimes it may not, it may also not show yours in favour of other sites thus not flooding the serps with stars everywhere.. Hope that helps. Tim

Thanks Rebecca. Unfortunately if you remove the brand name, even a long tail search that includes the restaurant name and city ranks incredibly low which just seems unusual. Webmaster claims only a tiny number of indexed pages, but when I google "site:" with our domain name, i see thousands of pages in the index... The query report in GA isn't showing me any data unfortunately. Haven't set up a rank checker yet only because it's so low I figured there was probably some overall major issue going on..

Hi Julie, What you are describing about your competitor's reviews does sound suspicious. While you may not be able to figure out exactly what they've done, you do have the option of reporting spam to Google if you become convinced that spam is involved. Regarding posting reviews to Google on behalf of your clients, that is actually also spam, so not a plan you'd want to pursue. Regarding the names used on Google-based reviews, for a couple of years, it was required that users have a Google+ account to leave a review and that this had to reflect their actual name. Just a few weeks ago, Google revoked this policy and users with any type of Google account can now leave a review again. So, if my Google account is HappyPuppy, I can leave a review ... it doesn't have to include my full name anymore. I've tested this, and it seems to be true. So, this may assist some of your customers who would like to leave a review for you on Google but don't want their full name on it. But, at the same time, your industry would certainly seem to be one where getting reviews is going to be a bit tougher than average given that a) privacy is a major concern for clients and b) your competitor who may be spamming his way to a high review count sticks out like a sore thumb for having 10x as many reviews as anyone else. Your question made me do a random search for 'bankruptcy attorney denver': https://www.google.com/search?q=getting+reviews+in+sensitive+industries&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=bankruptcy attorney denver&rflfq=1&rlha=0&rllag=39697170,-104939747,1337&tbm=lcl&tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:2&rlfi=hd:;si: I see everything from 0 to 50+ reviews on the listings of the top 10 companies Google is pulling. And, yep, I do see a pretty high percentage of first-time reviews on one of the profiles I looked at. So, there could be something a bit odd about 50+ people being eager to openly rave about the services received from a bankruptcy lawyer, or maybe people really do feel that way. At any rate, it looks like Denver bankruptcy attorneys are getting more views, on average, than what you are seeing in your city, so there may be hope if you have truly loyal clients who do not mind speaking about their experience and whom you can advise about the recent change Google has made to its requirements for leaving a review. I'd love to see someone write a good, up-to-date blog post on this topic of earning reviews in sensitive industries. If anyone in the community knows of a good one, please share!

Thanks Eric - While we are well-aware of various ranking monitor tools (we currently use MozPro), that's the essence of our question here. And it leads to the bigger question: What is main value of SEO these days given how it's realistically possible that most of your target audience is now getting personalized SERP results anyway. So then why put in all the effort to rank for particular terms when you could be easily displaced by sites your audience has viewed more regularly than your own and hence Google gives them the better position over yours regardless of having better SEO implemented on your site?

Thanks for sharing your experience! I'll look for the blog post on this topic for sure.

I'm gonna have to second EGOL on this. Sounds like you've got a pretty sweet thing going.

Shopify support telling me this isnt possible, do you know otherwise per chance ? cheers dan

Google has made it pretty clear in the past--translated content, even if it is directly translated as you suggest, is not duplicate content. So, if you have a page in English (even the meta data) and translate it into Spanish, those two pages are NOT duplicates.

I'm not sure how you're blocking Google from crawling external links in the robots.txt file--typically you only block them from crawling internal pages on your site. If you're using a script, though, to track the clicks on external links and that script is running your site (and you're blocking that script in robot.txt), then that still should be fine. You may want to add a "nofollow" tag on those links, though, so you don't end up passing link "credit" or "link juice" to those affiliates (unless you want to do that?). As far as external links go, though, it's typically okay (and expected) that you link out to other sites.

Happy Friday! You're very welcome. Zip codes do sometimes apply to more than one area, it's true, but if the Google Map shows the business inside the borders of Farmers Branch rather than Dallas, stick with Farmers Branch. Hope this helps!

hi all the SEO experts I would like to extend the question to the point that a lot of words and word combinations specifically in the tech arena can be used in English for some languages. I am working now on EN and DE websites on a website for SaaS, a lot of page titles coincide in both languages and they are actually not translated. What would you recommend in this case? Would hreflang solve my issue? Thank you

Here's another recommendation for Google's Keyword Tool. I'd also like to add the the Landing Pages tool in the Keyword Rankings section of Moz Pro is intended to help restore some search volume data when it comes to keyword traffic to your own site.

I honestly think that Google is aiming to be smart enough to understand that a red widget, green widget and blue widget are really all the same thing in different colors, and that at some point in the near future that kind of nuance will kill the need for 89 mostly duplicate pages. That feels really, really thin to me. As for getting the words on the page in a way that isn't utter spam, what about serving a photo caption along with a color selection? Making sure your images are appropriately named like "red-widget.png", working the colors in in such a way that they're providing useful context to the image being displayed?

Hi Saijo, Absolutely! in fact that is exactly what I was looking for in the Information Box, I wanted to see the source of the definition. When citing a source it feels like it would look better to cite Merriam Webster rather then Google, if that makes any sense. But perhaps Google is aware of that perception and this is an effort to change it. I know there is a difference between Snippets and the Information Box or I think Google calls it "Knowledge Graph", but when I didn't see a source my wheels started turning. I really like the Snippets as you and EGOL point out, they are extremely helpful and can be a valuable source of traffic. Thanks guys for your thoughts, Don

I agree with Miriam. The only thing I would add here - consider making changes to your lead conversion form to reinforce the "we only work in California" aspect. This could be like a check box up front that says "Are you located in California?" If they select "No," the rest of the form disappears and they get a message that says "At this time, we're only able to serve the California area. Thank you for your interest!" or something. You could keep your lead form as-is and if people select a state other than California when entering their location information, send them to a different thank you page that delivers a similar message. Basically, I would recommend changing your lead process so that a.) it's really clear to users that you don't operate outside of California, and b.) the information about whether or not a lead is from California is easy to see up-front in your lead management system. You'll probably still get some irrelevant leads (everyone does), but you'll be able to deal with them quicker.

If the different parts of the business are unique enough I would recommend going with either separate websites. On the other hand, you could separate the business in a subfolder. I would avoid putting the other business in a subdomain. Rand does an excellent job explaining the difference between sub domains and subfolders in a Whiteboard Friday.