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Thanks for the answer Kevin. For those interested in learning about using the HTTP Header to establish a canonical tag, you can look here on Google's Webmaster Central Blog.

Before you start chasing new keywords, make sure that they are relevant and useful keywords for your customers. Remember that the purpose is always to bring lots of the right traffic to your site, not just lots of traffic. So before you do anything, check that all that great traffic you're getting now is actually useful to you. Is it converting to sales, if that's what you ultimately want? If you haven't got goals set up already in google analytics, go do it now. Assuming that the traffic really is beneficial to you - ie visitors are completing your goals - then analyse where the traffic is coming from, and on what keywords. You might find that traffic from a certain website brings in higher value visitors than organic search, for example - or vice versa. Ok so now you know you're getting loads of traffic, it's converting well, and you know exactly what types of traffic converts best. So you want to replicate that and get even more traffic. Maybe all the traffic and goals are around one product or section of your website? If there is content that no one is finding, that's what you should concentrate on. There's no point in ranking well for keywords that have nothing to do with your website (plus it's really hard to do). So find that area that is getting ignored, and create some great additional content on it. Blog posts, infographics, beautiful photography.... whatever is right for your content. Now go back to your analytics, and see what you can learn from the bits of your website that already do well. Go to websites that are linking to that content, and see if they might want to link to your new content. Getting loads of interest from social media? Seed your new content there too. What you're trying to do is replicate the success you already have. Ultimately what you need is good quality links from good quality websites, pointing to your new content. This will do wonders for your SEO and you'll start getting great organic keyword traffic.

You need to keep it for local SEO. Although Google has decided this is a separate product now, its role will certainly change in the future. They have already made changes to the Google Plus app If the listing has good customer reviews, I would not delete it. There are brand pages aside from local pages. It really depends on how this was set up. Brand page or local? You should be able to transition it. See this article as a reference. http://localu.org/blog/google-now-allows-brand-pages-become-local-pages/

Hello, my friend. To be fair, I've assumed for the past year or so that link building is dead, unless you can get natural, really good links One doesn't exclude another It's actually the same thing. Basically, you create awesome content, then you promote it, share it, spread it out to people who (if they really like it) link naturally to it. The thing is that potential "linkers" won't find this super-awesome content, unless you "make"/help them find that content. Also you can use in-industry forums, q/a etc where you would link to related content you've written. Here are some good articles/videos about link building: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday P.S. In fact you can consider these links above as a part of MOZ's link building strategy. Awesome content and I just linked to it. (in this case it's from the same domain,but idea stays the same)

Are you running the W3 Cache plugin? If so, this might be your issue. Alternatively, remove your site from Webmaster Tools and re-add it again. I have had this fix the issue in the page. -Andy

Ok, cool. To reiterate - with escaped_fragment you are just serving the same content in a tweaked format and Google recommend it rather than frown upon it. Good to be sure though. See you at SearchLove!

Should we even have a /en-us/ version when our root domain is the default version, in english, and targeted to US primarily? Hi Andrew, The general rule of thumb here, is if your target is the US and language English, then this should sit at the root of the site rather than within a location identifier - so from what you say, this is implemented incorrectly. Correct this and it should correct your issues. However, you will need to set some 301's so that any pages that are indexed under /en-us/ will forward on to the new and correct URL. I hope this helps. -Andy

Hi Michael Dmitrii has the right idea. If site A's links to site B are spammy, it doesn't matter if the site has been penalized or not by Google to pass bad link value to site B. A deindexation is just an action by Google to penalize site A, but site A could be sending spammy signals all along. So I would make your decision based upon the quality of links. This post on how to judge link quality might help: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/backlink-analysis/ I'd be more concerned about Google picking up on there being an ownership connection between the two sites, unless you're completely transparent about that anyway.

Thanks Andy! Agreed - Google shouldn't drop the map listing, but instead merge the organic listings into one I suppose. I'll give it a shot!

I wonder whether anyone has carried out any research into this issue? Are there any stats out there?

Alright, well my advice runs counter to common wisdom: don't worry so much about whether it's on a sub-domain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ My feeling is that you should worry a lot more about what the blog is linking to. I've personally had access to look into 2 of the most-cited subdomain examples. In one of them the company moved into a subdomain, but broke a massive document up into about 7 pieces - and each piece started getting organic traffic. This happened at the same time, so I don't think it can be attributed to the sub-domain movement. In another case the blog logo linked back to the blog home, and there were almost no links to the sales pages. Changing the header resulted in more links to the root domain, so yes - rankings improved. I've heard other anecdotes of people moving to sub-folders and seeing big boosts in their non-blog rankings due to the links from the blog. For the last 5 years, though, I've seen no credible evidence. I've been in a good position to see the opposite. One more story: a friend of mine just moved a MASSIVELY-cited blog (blog PA 75) off the sub-domain, but his nav was already mirroring the www version (which has 1/15th the links). Impact on rankings: absolutely none. I'd still install on the same server if I could, just for the sake of maintenance, but if you can't find a technical solution just make sure you link architecture makes sense.

Hello, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604777?hl=en That would be your main guidelines. Now, here are my questions/suggestions. How did you translate that website? Is it automatically generated through google translate? Have you done any other spammy stuff? Is your backlink profile clean? According to Matt explainations in video above, it would have to be very good reason to mark your website as pure spam. So, if you just translated (properly) english website, then it shouldn't be the reason for taking manual action on your website. So, check everything else. Now, as to your questions. I think that would depend on is your "healthy" website really healthy. Because if it's actually as spammy (at least in the eyes of google), then you'll basically tell google "Hey, look at my another spammy website". But, I believe, if english website is all good and has no spam attached to it, then it shouldn't be a problem. According to Matt, it will be pretty difficult to unmark your website and you'll have to spend a lot of time and effort on proving it. So, roll up your sleeves and get ready to work. If you're translating it, you're pretty much rewriting it. I used to work as a translator and there is no way to translate word to word, the proper way of translation is when you translate the idea/thought/intent, not words itself. Hope this helps.

You guys are awesome. These are very very helpful answers I'll get to work!

unless your talking about  URLs that are on your site it is describing inbound anchor text the answer would be number two Hope that helps, Tom

Thank you all for this valuable feedback. I will try some of these variations to see what yields more favorable results. Thanks again!

Hi Tai, Glad to hear that this is all sorted out. All the best, Tom

Thanks for the feedback everyone! All very helpful and appreciated.

Hey Gannon, Good questions! Quick answers: Yes, you should be using the business name exactly as it appears in the real world. So, no extra capitals. Think about a huge chain like Whole Foods. Google has no problem understanding that Whole Foods located in Dallas is not Whole Foods located in Boston. As Dmitri has said, it's your address/phone that separate the businesses. So, do be sure the phone numbers are separate. Additionally, be sure you have a separate page on the website for each branch and be sure that all other citations are consistently pointing to the respective landing page for the correct location instead of to the homepage or some other page on the site. With this strategy, your client should be just fine.