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  • Hey John, I hope you will get a reply from someone with hands-on experience with directory development, which I don't have, but here's what I think: Obviously, Yahoo has been using Yelp reviews for some time (http://www.webpronews.com/yelp-reviews-no-longer-appearing-in-yahoo-local-results-2015-08) so there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea. On the other hand, yes, you'd be republishing someone else's content on your own site. So, I can see the cause for concern. That being said, yes, it could be that a different engine like Google is going to recognize that as coming from big Yelp and it might not be a problem, but I wouldn't bank on this if it were my company. Finally, the strategy seems a bit iffy to me, to use Yelp's content if you are trying to build a directory that competes with Yelp for your niche. I think the ideal here for your platform would be to build its own value. After all, you have no control over how a third party vets reviews, filters them, trusts them, etc. Yelp's take on this isn't your take and you may have totally different requirements for assessing the value of UGC. Again, hope you'll get some further replies on this, but I wanted to at least get the conversation going. I hope folks will disagree with me if they have a totally different take on this. John's question is a very good one!

    Local Listings | | MiriamEllis
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  • Hey There, How new is the location? How old and how good are the website optimization, citations and reviews? Are all branches being marketed with proper separateness (no shared phone numbers, duplicated content, etc?). Do you have any reason to suspect a filter or penalty on the business of any kind? This one is going to be very hard to troubleshoot without being able to Look at the actual business Stand in the parking lot with the client and his mobile device but, the above are some first ideas. These situations can be really tough to diagnose.

    Local Strategy | | MiriamEllis
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  • Hi Sean, Thank you! I'll keep an eye out for their response.

    Moz Local | | VERBInteractive
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  • Hi Sean again, Thank you, and I can appreciate putting requests like this through the help@ email. I'll note that for the future. I'll keep an eye out for the response to the ticket.

    Moz Local | | VERBInteractive
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  • Hi Gayane! Thanks for your kind note. As this question is on a totally different topic than the original question, I want to advise you to please start a brand new question for this. This way, you'll get feedback from the community as well as staff. I promise, I'll pop into your thread once you start a new one

    Reviews and Ratings | | MiriamEllis
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  • Hi Gemma, Strange! Typically, %20 is the symbol that content management systems use to convert spaces into allowable characters in URLs. Have you found any URLs that were written in the HTML with an accidental space? That said, I know I'm a Moz associate and all, but Moz and Ahrefs are not nearly as good at understanding the web as Google; it's completely possible that these are errors that their crawlers are picking up, but Google isn't having a problem. Try searching for "site:[duplicate URL]" to see if Google is indexing this "duplicate content." I just checked with the example you provided, and it's not in Google's index. If some other duplicate content URLs are in Google's index, then I'd use Google Analytics to determine where the traffic is coming from to these pages, in order to find where the URLs are written incorrectly. Hope this helps! Kristina

    Technical SEO Issues | | KristinaKledzik
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  • Thank you for the reply. Great ideas! I am building a big case to present soon. This isn't going to be easy, but i've got some fight in me.

    Branding / Brand Awareness | | reusabletranspack
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  • Hey Lana, Similar to what Anthony said, you're setup should keep the PDF url from being indexed. In order to help ensure the PDF doesn't get indexed you can do the following: Use the robots.txt file to block Google crawlers: User-agent: * Disallow: *.pdf Use rel="nofollow" on links that point to the PDF Download PDF Hope this helps!

    Technical SEO Issues | | Coolguyry
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  • Https - google has been warning us - https is preferred over http.  At the moment if two sites are equal https will prevail.  Alick is spot on. However google is conditioning us at present - so that when it amps up the power for https we will be prepared. I have no doubt google will amp up the power of https in 2-3 years if not earlier - significantly more juice will be given to https sites over http. https hurts PBN's and impacts many black hat practices. The sooner you do it and bed https down the better. There maybe a slight loss in page loading speed, which should be monitored. Hope that assists.

    Technical SEO Issues | | ClaytonJ
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  • Hi Teconsite, this is a great question. I would not recommend marketing the "p" parameter in Search Console. Instead, I'd leave it as "Let Google Decide" and use  your pagination SEO implementation to guide the search engines. There is still a lot of debate around pagination as it relates to SEO. The way I have always implemented is is: Every paginated page canonicals to itself, because you do not want the search engines to start ignoring your paginated pages which are there somewhat for users, but also for SEO. Use rel next/prev to help Google understand that they are in pagination, which will also help them rank the beginning of pagination for the terms you are trying to rank for. Use noindex/follow on pages 2-N to be sure they stay out of Google's index. Use the numbers showing how long pagination is to drive the search engines deep into your pagination to get all of your products/whatever indexed.  This is often done through linking to page 1, the last page, and the 3-5 pages on either side of the page you are currently on. So page 7 of 20 would like to page 1, pages 5-9, and page 20. The reason most people say to canonical pages 2-N to the base page is to preserve any link equity pointing to these pages and help the first page rank. However, I have almost never seen a deep paginated page with links, and if you have architected pagination correctly then the equity going into pages 2-N will also flow to page 1, just like product pages linking to category pages. Hope this helps!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dohertyjf
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  • Dmitri has it covered. Have you read this article about silo links? http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/silo.htm There maybe some juice benefit to be passed through to your commercial pages.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClaytonJ
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  • Hi again Tymen, The mozscape crawl didn't work as intended and the data is incomplete from the last crawl, (see: https://moz.com/community/q/september-s-mozscape-update-broke-we-re-building-a-new-index) so you might not see these updated links until the next scheduled crawl (early October) Are you see the new links in Google Webmaster Tools (AKA search console)? I wouldn't focus on seeing the backlinks in Moz and focus more on continuing to build more links. As the saying goes "a watched kettle never boils" set a reminder to check back in early October to see if your links are showing up, but in the meantime continue to focus on building more links. I hope that helps. https://moz.com/community/q/september-s-mozscape-update-broke-we-re-building-a-new-index

    Moz Tools | | VERBInteractive
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  • Yes you can redirect the 3 URLs to the new product page and everything would be alright. The question to consider though, would be if you had tens of thousands of product pages and so then would need tens of thousands of redirects. If the old pages did not get much or any traffic, or just the popup URL was hardly ever visited, it might not make sense to implement the redirects. Those redirects could slow down portions of your server or site while processing those redirects. Essentially if you had a bunch of old pages that were just never useful, let them 404. If they were useful and linked to or in the index, then 301 redirect to the new page. Hope that helps?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joe.Robison
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