Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Christopher, Unfortunately, Google doesn't have a function for setting seasonal dates/hours. Here's a recent thread from the Google forum, including a response from a Top Contributor: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/V4cjaNYIS6w;context-place=topicsearchin/business/seasonal|sort:date Here's another: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/U1Vo5-afRDo;context-place=topicsearchin/business/seasonal|sort:date It's my memory that Google once forbid the inclusion of seasonal businesses in their local product, but this language no longer exists in their guidelines. If you report the business as closed, then you will likely lose rankings ... just not a great situation. Is there no staff at the location at all during the off-season? Not even to take phone calls?

That's what I was thinking too.  It may only be a few weeks but that will give me some idea what to keep. I just didn't know if that mattered and removing those pages would have a negative effect.  But since it's on a separate domain, it guess not. Thanks!

Thank you for the great advice Dirk! I will likely have to get one my more technical co-workers to help with this, but now I can at least adequately describe the problem and solution to this. Three separate URL's for the home page alone is definitely a priority to be fixed. Thank you again!

Hello Joshua, What you are describing is nothing to be concerned about. It is a completely natural process when content is being created for there to be some form of reciprocal linking. This is especially true in list-pieces such as the one you are describing. There is no real need to avoid linking directly to them, and certainly nothing to worry about with regards to their social media accounts. What Google is trying to get away from is people creating websites to link to each other using the same hosting or from the same webmaster. This is what leads to penalties. From their perspective, you are all (likely) on separate hosting, you all have different webmasters, and you are clearly recognized brands that are completely separate from one another. This is the kind of article they would want to see show up and is unlikely to create any unwelcome attention. The links you receive will have plenty of value, assuming you are not being linked-to extravagantly over and over from the same domain. It's totally normal to see a couple of pages on a single domain link to another, but it gets to be spammy when you begin seeing 10's, 100's or even 1000's of links coming from a single source. What you are describing is normal content creation - something Google has been adamant about for years. I don't think there's anything for you to worry about here. Best of luck with the launch! Rob

Hi KJ, Agree with the consensus here that building mini sites is not the right approach. Take whatever energy you would have put into developing these and channel it into making the landing pages for your locations the best in their industry/towns. I was just watching a great little video by Darren Shaw in which this is one of the things he covers. Might be worth sharing with your team: http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/70-website-optimization-basics-for-local-seo And earlier this year, Phil Rozek penned some pretty fine tips on making your pages strong: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/06/25-principles-of-building-effective-city-pages-for-local-seo/ I am curious about one element of your original post. You mention, "We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations." I wasn't sure whether you were saying that you've never done well in them, were doing well in them until something changed (such as the universal rollout of Local Stacks) or something else. With the latter, I would guess that a huge number of businesses are now struggling to cope with the fact that there are only 3 spots to rank for any keyword, necessitating greater focus on lower volume keywords/categories, organic and paid results. Everybody but the top 3 businesses is now in this boat. Very tough.

Agree with the points above with one exception.   Yes, you have to find a way to deal with duplicate and quality content at scale.  Yes, Robots.txt, nofollow links and index sitemaps are your friends.  I would not use rel=canonical unless I had to.  Better to get those extra pages de-indexed and then not let Google crawl the urls with the extra parameters to start with.  Why waste Google's time in crawling pages that are just resorted versions of another?   If you use the directives wisely you probably "only" have 200,000 pages worth crawling if you have that many sort parameters. Good luck!

Hello, There's not really a "best way" to build links. Everyone has their own strategy that works best for them. You can begin with the Beginner's Guide to Link Building. In terms of "high-domain and page trust" links, you best bet would probably be to start with a competitor analysis of your closest competitors in your region, and begin the process with websites that have shown a propensity for linking to others in your niche or industry. For an in-depth look at link building tactics, the Little Blue linkbuilding Book is a great place to start: https://blog.ahrefs.com/little-blue-book/Little-Blue-Book-by-Ahrefs.pdf Hope this helps! Rob

Sure thing.  Presuming your main site's blog is in WordPress, there's this handy-dandy importer: https://wordpress.org/plugins/blogger-importer/ There are instructions in the Installation section on how to export your existing Blogspot posts into an XML format that the importer can then read.

Hi Heidi! Did Chris and Robert answer your question?

Thanks to all.

I see over 50% "not available" for keyword volumes (when working with swedish keywords). These are not long-tail keywords and Keyword Planner in Adwords show these as having search volume. How can this be?

Greetings! Sounds like you have done some good already done and plenty of work ahead of you. Looking at your plan, I have a few suggestions that may help. 1. On your articles, consider creating a how-to or demonstration video to go along with the articles. This will give you video content to go along with the blog that you can optimize separately and will make that article more "sticky". 2. I'd also consider something tangible people can download to accompany each article, like a guide, checklist, diagram, infographic or something else of value. Keep it short, like 1-2 pages at the most, and put your branding and contact info all over it. The more graphical the better to increase the sharability on social media. 3. In addition to homepage links to social sites, I'd consider them on every page. I'd also add social sharing buttons to your blog to make sharing the content easier for users. 4. At the end of your articles, suggest one or more products that tie in with the article as a call to action. Even stronger, offer a discount or bundled offer. 5. An outreach campaign to potential influencers can really boost your social media marketing efforts both now and long term. Find some bloggers or journalists, and start interacting with them in social media or even directly in email. I regularly solicit input and link to content of influencers, creating good will. That often turns into then doing the same in return, giving my great links and mentions in their content. That's 5 quick suggestions. I'm sure there is some more good input from the group. Best of luck!

Right. Chain redirects = bad. However, in the same video of Matt Cutts, he does say that the overall amount doesn't matter, and that's what I was talking about in first part of my previous answer. Now, let's crunch some numbers to show you that the number of no-chain redirects doesn't matter. Assume that we are in perfect world, so all given manufacturer given numbers actually right and all operations per second are actually operations per second Lets say that standard hosting server is 2GHz power = 2*10^9 computations per second Since all htaccess work/computations are strictly on a server side (bots/browsers just send request to server for response if page should be redirected), the only time which can slow down the request is server response time. Match computations are always considered low computation power processes. so, let's say you have htacces with 1 000 000 redirect rules, server keeps it in memory to do match computations when bots make requests, it means that 2GHz server has to have 2000 requests per second to just START struggling. So, do you have 2000 requests per second to your website and 1 million redirect rules? P.S. All number above are very rough approximations P.P.S. If you really wanna see if your server is/ would struggle - login into web host manager, go to server status and info, look and see how much of your server power is usually being used. Usually that number is lower than 6-7% at 90% of the time. Hope this clarify some things

Hi, I don't want to insult you with to basic of an explanation so please tell me if this isn't what you mean and im over simplifying it. Find a link on your website, right click it and click on inspect element, this will bring up a developer panel at the bottom of your browser (its different for each browser, but there are all similar.) It will have the code that makes the link highlighted amongst the rest of the code that makes up the page. For instance the "The Mission" link in your footer has this code The mission <a  ="" link="" tag<br="">href="">  = the URL parameter where the link should follow</a>  = closing the tag where the link stops Best SEO practice is The mission You should then take this 1 step further for best SEO and include a title parameter for the link which would look like this  The mission Edit: Can't spell

Hi Peter, A generic domain name's website can geo-target more than one country only it is follow a geo-targeting subfolders or subdomains strategy. For instance, domain.com may geo-target its root on UK and its subfolder domain.com/ie/ on Ireland (or ie.domain.com, in case of subdomain). If the site you are talking about is http://www.wsidigitalweb.co.uk/, then I see it hard to follow a subfolder/subdomain strategy, because the content will be substantially the same. Not impossible, but complicated. An option could be: creating duplicating everything but the blog both in the root (for UK) and a /ie/ subfolder; then creating to properties on Search Console (1 for the UK version and 1 for the IE one) and geo-target them appropriately; then localizing as much as possible the two versions. if you have prices, convert them in Euros for Ireland. If you can buy an Irish phone number, present it in your contact information and so on; then implementing the hreflang in order to tell Google to show the UK version to British users from Great Britain and the Irish version to Irish users from Ireland. I suggest to not duplicate the blog, because in that case you should be always paying attention in implementing the hreflang correctly every time you publish a new post, and because - a even greater bias - you will have to double your efforts in promoting the blog's content. Remember, then, that backlinks are very helpful also for geotargeting, so try to create content that answers to real needs your geo-targeted audiences have, and remember to dedicate some of your posts to topics particularly urgent for one or the other specific country target.

Alright, I see what you're talking about. I have tried to do similar search in Russian Google - it gave me the same suggestion. https://www.google.nl/intl/en-NL/policies/technologies/cookies/ As far as I understand Google uses your browser locale and settings to offer different language, so, if you say all your settings are in dutch, then I'd look into your normal usage - do you mostly search in english? do you mostly browse english websites etc. Additionally I noticed in past that even if you tell Chrome browser not to suggest to translate page, it still does it. There is even meme about that (can't find it now).

Hi, Could you clarify what you mean with "none of the images are indexed in Google Webmaster"? Did you submit an image sitemap? If you do an image search - it seems that the correct images are found. Most important factors for image search is having correct Alt text (seems to be ok) a descriptive image name (could be improved - you use spaces in the filenames - would be better to use '-') you also provide a correct alt & title on the link to the bigger image so that look ok as well. you could add a caption to the image to make it even more obvious what the image is about. A good guide on image optimisation can be found here Hope this helps, Dirk

Completely agreed with Moosa. you can also check below post. http://blog.woorank.com/2013/03/a-guide-to-clean-urls-for-seo-and-usability/ Hope this helps. Thanks