Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This looks to me like someone who knows SEO is important but has no idea what they're doing. Russ is right, superfluous meta tags haven't worked for nearly 10 years, if they ever did at all.

I'm on this same path since we too cannot use noindex / nofollow due to limited backend interaction with Bigcommerce. I like to block all cart related pages, which for ecommerce sites can be a boat load. /cart.php /checkout.php /finishorder.php /*login.php just to name a few, then you have the sorting and compare pages, they have to be blocked or a mess unfolds. Disallow: /*sort=newest Disallow: /*sort=bestselling Disallow: /*?page=       ( Big duplicate page issue if you don't block this one with a wildcard, and cannot access your .htaccess file or the backend properly to noindex / nofollow ) Just to name a few, in my case, I only want the meat of the site to be indexed and rank for. Otherwise one client's site was ranking terms that more related to web development than the niche industry they lived in. Plus with a limited index budget, why would you want google or anyone else to crawl pages on your site with no SEO value towards your niche? Unless you sold carts as in web developed carts for ecommerce sites you wouldn't want much of that indexed anyways, and even in that case, those pages aren't too useful for ranking. At least from what I've gathered in the niche industries.

Greetings Stacey, If your site is built on WordPress, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin and set categories to "noindex". You can find this in the menu for "Titles &Metas" and then "Taxonomies" in the Yoast plugin. I did that recently for tags, categories and archives within a client's blog to remove duplicate content notices in my Moz reports. That being said, it MAY have some impact on your position in the SERPs. I hope that helps. Best Regards, Mark

Ah right got you! Thanks for the response.

K Andy is correct. The practice used by your competitor is outdated and against google guidelines. From our experience we often see (looked at one last week) exact matching domains rank highly without any other metric being strong or comparable to competitors. However it is counter intuitive as if you were today to buy an exact matching domain and then expect it to rank well without hard work - well it simply does not happen anymore. They seem like relics, and panda updates have passed them, likely thin content as well. For some reason often exact matching domains that breach google guidelines still rank well - in my observation in low competition spaces. Your examples are all local.  The key is not to attempt any bad practices, even though they are ranking for them as it will hurt your site. So in answer to your questions. 1. It is not good technique - in fact usually penalized. 2. content spinning is not a good technique - in fact usually penalized. You have an awesome opportunity.  One dedicated site with a single site approach. As distinct from his 4 sites. All work undertaken on your site (Creating unique content, testimonials, obtaining awesome links) goes to benefit all of of your store locations at once, if your site is well structured. Your website obtains maximum 'juice' out from your hard work and the site authority strengthens over time. You can smash those 4 sites with a bit of work. Hope that assists.

Hi, When I see links like this, the first thing I worry about is whether your site has been hacked. But yes, attempts at negative SEO are possible as well. Whenever, Google is asked about negative SEO like this they say that they are generally really good at determining that these are not links that you made yourself and that you are safe to ignore them. But, they do always recommend disavowing just to be sure. Here are my thoughts on your questions: Do these links hurt your SEO, even if nofollowed? If nofollowed they are no harm to you. However, in some hackings what the hackers will do is point thousands of nofollowed links from domains they control and then, somewhere down the road they can change them to followed. As such, in this case I'd still disavow the nofollowed links. What else can you do other than disavow? Not much unfortunately. If you find that a lot of these links point to a particular page you can 404 or 410 that page and that will get rid of the links. But otherwise, sadly, there's not much else you can do. Most likely Google will ignore these links but no one can say for sure.

Hi Chris, With ccTLDs, you have your geo-targeting setup for the UK. You do need to set up the .com for the US if that is what the content is targeted to as Logan mentioned. As to why the .com is showing higher, is the content identical between the two sites? If not, how are they different? In the mean time, you can detect their location using IP and ask anyone on the wrong site using a JavaScript prompt if they would like to be on the other version. Give them the option, never redirect based on IP. You'll need a developer to do this.

Thanks for your response guys. I got your point - need to remove some keywords repeating to make the website look more natural and need to update the site architecture. But I can't agree on "doorway" pages statemnet. Every page of the website has unique content. Infact, there is one of our competitors who OUTRANK US with copy/paste text on every area page like this: "Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Barnet" "Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Acton" "Man and Van service copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste,copy/paste, area Hammersmith" How is that possible? I thought that content is king for Google but in this case a website with duplicate content outrank a website with unique content.

Most likely not. The links may have been created by a 3rd-party bot, a Fiverr project, or something similar that can't be easily traced. The only thing left to do is ask yourself who benefits from the negative SEO attack. Even so, that's likely a large pool of search competitors.

Great answer Chris! Manas, It sounds to me like Google does not consider your brand to be an "entity" worth ranking for it's own brand name. This is why you're getting the "Did You mean?" link or "Search instead for..." in search results for your brand. The stronger your brand becomes - in Google's eye's - the less likely it is that people will see "Did You mean?" for the search. Of course, without actually knowing the terms, it's difficult to say. If your brand name is "Helocopter" it would need to be VERY strong for Google not to show results for "Helicopter". However, if your brand is "HeelCooper" you could probably resolve that problem, and several of your others, with the suggestions below. Go Through This Presentation and implement what you can, such as: Organization Schema with Schema.or Markup in the HTML or with JSON-LD Add and Define your brand on WikiData, Wikimedia and other open data sources, or repositories for brand entities Work your way up to WikiPedia by doing noteworthy things that generate press Make sure your Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) are consistent across the web. There are many ways to format things: (Street, St. | Road Rd. | 1800, 1-800 | 555-999-5555, (555) 999-5555) | ABC, ABZ. The important thing is consistency. You need to "Disambiguate" your brand from whatever that other keyword is. This is important for search, but also in reducing the amount of your potential customers who misspell your brand. Drive more searches for your brand, and subsequent clicks to your site by generating positive publicity. Use PPC ads for your branded terms, and that other term if possible, to get as much of that traffic as possible to your site, even if you aren't ranking #1. Also, google will be less likely to recommend another search if the one you performed is generating income for them. And they can use the data gained from those real user searches to inform their algorithms, which will - hopefully - eventually result in your site showing up, as it should, for branded searches. If none of this works, consider re-branding.

Always happy to see an EGOL response. For me the issue really is one of credulity. When regularly I am approached by those who want to put something on one of our websites or client's websites I am always struck by how blatant they are and how assumptive they try to be. These we can call content marketers, but I like EGOL's reference - they are solicitors. They are not unlike when I was in another business and had a lot of customers; regularly people would approach with the world famous ... "VALUE ADD!" We were supposed to let them market to our customers for free because there world changing product or service was so massively valuable. I think my sarcasm tells you my answer to them was the same as my answer to any content marketer, good bye. Please stop the spam. With requests to write something I am fairly cautious but do have a couple of known business or marketing blogs that I infrequently contribute to. Since they are publishing media on the web, I am fine with calling them publicists. Interesting discussion you started Felicia, Robert

The fetch as Googlebot function in GWT is definitely your best bet here. Most JavaScript dropdowns I've run into are being indexed properly by Google by now but if your particular JS implementation isn't being executed when fetching as Googlebot, then you'll need to use a solution like prerender.

I think writing the RIGHT email that is effective i.e. gets read and your call to action, acted upon. We get so many emails, so you only have a few seconds to catch the reader with your title and make the email easy to read or understand upon first look (do call to actions, links, important information, stand out and are easy to understand?) I recently wrote a post geared towards my clients about tailoring emails to get their applicants to return. I work with organizations that have membership or attendees (events, educational programs, etc) who are always looking for ways to tap into their past attendee and participant lists to get them excited about upcoming programs or events and encourage them to return. Currently for example,it's summer camp registration season so my camp director clients want a way for their email marketing strategies to pay off with past families registering again for this summer. You can check out that post here: http://www.regpacks.com/blog/great-marketing-email-to-applicants/ But like Chris said above, I think its really about figuring out what your email recipients want and figuring out how you can get your email to stand out. Following basic rules like titles that aren't too long, are attention grabbing, and have a clear call to action that is easy to identify in the body of the emails will help. If someone can look quickly at your subject, understand what the email is and find what they want/need in the content of your email easily and quickly, you will have a higher click through rate and response to what your email is selling. Good luck!