Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If it is a personal blog, it is a correct way of implementing those meta tags, as publisher and author is the same. If it is a site with several authors, I would change the publisher TAG so that it starts pointing your Google+ page, and the author tag pointing to your profiles. So you will benefit of both tags.

Redirecting via a 301 is always the preferred method of pointing one page to another Devon. Just from what I have seen, I can't see a reason why this should cause you any issue. Just have the location pages follow a preferred route and stick with that. Take all of the non-preferred pages and 301 these to the ones you wish to use. You should be fine and avoid any issue of duplication. -Andy

Hi guys, thanks for picking that up. Don't know why I missed it! GA code was in the header.php of the old theme and was lost when I switched themes. I've added it back now so I'll see what happens. I can see how that would have impacted the search traffic graph on Moz Pro, but I'm still not sure if it would have affected how Moz reports my keyword rankings. Did I really suffer big drops in the SERPs as Moz reported? Or was it just a side-effect of Moz not being able to see traffic in my GA account? Tony

Martijn is correct.  I would recommend a subdomain as the last resort. It sounds like the pics have great SEO value. I would also recommend your client watch this WBF.  It covers many aspects including touching on video. https://moz.com/blog/panda-optimization-whiteboard-friday

Hey Kat. I'd tend to agree with Andy's response that moving this into one site makes sense. You could then redirect the local pages into the appropriate page on the main site, creating a single authoritative domain. You'd want to make sure as you do this that each local page is truly unique...if the Chicago and Detroit local sites both contain similar pages about a dog safety campaign, you'd want to consolidate those (probably) into a single dog safety campaign page that could work for both locations (or find a way to distinguish the content for each location). Now, having gone through a few projects like these, I know full well that what is best for SEO or UX isn't always the most popular solution. Internal politics play a role, and I'm guessing you might be in a spot where some of the local chapters don't want to relinquish control over their site. So, as an alternative solution you could look for some other ways to link these sites together. For instance, you could have a dog safety page on the main site that all the local chapters can link to and possibly, let the local chapters adjust the content slightly via the link. As in, if the url includes a query sting referencing Chicago (maincompanysite.net/dog-safety.php?location=Chicago), the content on that dog safety page could be programmed to show Chicago's phone number and address. That way you have a definitive page that can rank, but also a way for local chapters to share that content through their domain. A lot of that alternative comes down to content governance rules, communication about who creates what page, a clear understanding of how people link to sites, and probably some clear design/brand standards. It is a bit of a mess, but not an unrealistic reality if you can't convince all the stakeholders in the value of consolidating to a single domain. Hope that helps!

So is Citysearch.com part of the listing?  I see it on here https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us I see both of my clients listings on Citysearch.com, but there no pictures for them.  I assume that Moz Local push the info out to Citysearch.com http://www.citysearch.com/profile/810294520/chino_ca/pizzita_circle.html?impressionId=000b0000008a2d9e24e3d5473e86a4e854e4d5f363 My question, how do I edit this listing for CitySearch.com? Regards, Benny

Hi there I would mind Open Graph for users, definitely. I would mind Schema.org from the search engine aspect as all major search engines recognize it. When it comes to Dublin Core, I don't know much about it and don't read too much about it either - which tells me something. For my money, you should stick with Schema and Open Graph, again because of their wide acceptance. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there I would take a look at the best practices for title tags. Your title tag should be a mix of what users are actually searching for and editorial language for click throughs. Personally, I would just include the title, category (only if it adds value), and brand. You can include the date in the article itself. Just be mindful of length. Can you give examples of the categories? Let me know. Hope this helps a bit! Good luck!

Start by consolidating everything. Get control of all of the local domains, move the content over and redirect the local domains to their corresponding pages on the main site.

Hi Dino, How often does Google crawl your site? Google may not have found some of those inner pages. You can ask Google to recrawl any section of your site by using Fetch as Google, which gives you the option to "Submit to index". You can ask Googlebot Mobile to be the one doing the fetching, and I assume if you "Submit to index" after that, it'll get Googlebot Mobile to crawl the page again. But, it isn't clear. I would also double check that you have an XML sitemap which includes all of the URLs you'd like to rank. And, if this is at all possible, try adding links to the pages that still show "Try Anyway" to your homepage, even if it's temporary. Google crawls your homepage more often than any other page on your site, and is more likely to see those pages if they're directly linked off of there. Good luck! Kristina

Would that be Google's "Badger"?

Where this is  appearing the most is on cross domain canonicals. We have duplicate content across 2 websites, and we've canonicaled some pages from Site A to Site B, and some from Site B to Site A. In theory, pages that were canonicaled to the other domain should be deindexed. When I run a rankings report, I see pages for the wrong domain ranking, a month later. They are pages with parameters, or old URLs that we've changed. It's like a game of whack a mole. Every time we get a page deindexed, a duplicate with a different parameter takes its place. And this is in spite of calling out these parameters in GWT. What I imagine is happening is that we have several URLs for the same page indexed. When Google crawls our site, it is correctly canonicaling the page it crawls. In the rankings, however, Google is probably pulling a duplicate page out of its index, and ranking it without crawling it. If it was crawling it, Google would see the canonical tag, and not rank it. So we have an ongoing battle to get Google to crawl the page it just pulled out of its index to see the the canonical tag. The reason for all this is that when a page cross domain canonicals correctly, the rankings for the duplicate page on the other site goes up dramatically. As long as Google keeps ranking the wrong pages, we don't get the rankings bump on the other site.

Are individual versions of the quote form being indexed? Do they come up in a site: search of the website? Are individual quote form URLs serving as landing pages for organic traffic? If not, you are probably good to go. It doesn't sound to me like your current situation is much to worry about.

We had the exact same issue! I had the developer fix the 302 redirect that I found, but I am sure there are more errors in the redirects, so we are in the process of getting a full technical audit done so that we can fix any other errors. After you fixed the 302 redirects, how long did it take for the search engines to correctly index your site? Was there anything that you did that helped speed up the process?

This is a lot of good advice, thanks.  I did only use those two keywords as an example though.  So I guess my next question would be this: what if terms that are "against your branding" would draw much more traffic to your site, compared to very similar terms that are in line with your branding?  I'm really wondering if it would create consistency issues with the brand's messaging.  To people really care (or subconsciously notice) messaging differences in the page title/meta description vs. the content that's on the page or seen in marketing material? Thanks

Hi Kate - really appreciate you putting my mind at ease! 107 sounds about right, although I wonder if it's picking up some of the 'thin' category pages for example that WP creates. I really need to learn WP!

Has the main site been online for as long as the affiliates? Are you driving traffic to the main site in similar channels and volumes to what the affiliates are driving to their sites? If the content and on-page optimization is roughly the same, and if the sites have been up for the same amount of time, it's likely off-page optimization that's making the difference. The affiliates may be doing paid advertising, mentioning their sites on social media, and otherwise building a lot of links to their content that you're not doing on the main site. I would give it time and try to search for longer-tail keywords - more specific ones, so if you sell widgets, try to optimize some pages for "red curly widgets" and "blue titanium widgets" rather than competing for the more basic "widget" type keywords. The more specific you can be, while still choosing language that your visitors are searching for, the more you will see traffic rise to the main site and the better they will convert because they're looking for exactly what you're offering.