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Hey James, Thanks for starting this discussion. While I don't have stats on the number of businesses being 'caught', I do think it's a good thing that Yelp is willing to show proof to back up their decision to take action against a spamming business. I like transparency and some of the examples being featured in posts about this are totally outrageous. Business owners who want to fake reviews are starting out on such a wrong foot in rep management that an experience like being caught by Yelp could actually be doing these folks a huge favor. It may be one of those hard but vital lessons to learn.

My gosh guys, thanks so much for the thorough and insightful answers! Ironically you both cleared up my game plan in other parts of my business indirectly. So now, aside from my initial question - I've got a better plan for that as well. Brilliant. Thank you so much!

Hi there, I want to dig in a little about what's concerning you here. Are you worried that you're splitting link equity? Because, it's okay to have 4 pages about chocolate cakes. There's no penalty from Google for having multiple pages about the same thing - just think about how many pages Nordstrom has for black sweaters. There's actually a benefit to having multiple pages on the same topic, if you're willing to write unique content for each page. It means you can rank for more long tail keywords, just as you mentioned your .html pages do, since each page will have a slightly different angle. So, if your question was about duplicate content, know that you're okay. Leave the URLs as they are, but tweak the page titles and headers so they more clearly target the long tail search term that they're ranking for. Link to the .html versions of /chocolate-cake from /chocolate-cake.asp so that's clearly the higher level page, and spend more time optimizing that. If, on the other hand, what you're worried about is link equity, the idea that by having 4 pages about chocolate cakes (and 4 pages for every other other baked good), you're getting 25% of your link potential going to each page, making 4 PA 20 pages when you could have 1 PA 30 page, then there are a few things to look at. If there are external links to all 4 pages, then your answer lies in your competition. Search for the primary keyword that you'd hope you'd rank for if you could combine link equity for all 4 pages with the Moz toolbar turned on. Look at your competition - would you be able to beat that? Does your DA compete with other pages? Would your potential link count, once you had links from all 4 similar pages, allow you to rank on the first SERP? If you have no chance of ranking for your primary keyword, I suggest that you stick with your 4 variations and make sure you rank for a wide variety of terms around your core keyword. That'll get you more traffic, in the end. If you could rank on the first page for your primary keyword once you redirected those links from the .htmls, try to consolidate the content from all 4 pages. If you're cautious like me, I would do it one page at a time, combining content from both pages, redirecting one page, and then making sure that the .asp page can rank for the long tail terms that the .html page I redirected was ranking for before moving on. If you're less cautious, you can do them all at once, but you may lose that long tail traffic. Wow, that was a lot of "if"s! I hope I didn't lose you there. Also, I hope I answered the question you were getting at. Let me know! Kristina

Thank you so much! We're about to venture into multiple languages. Would you recommend an additional campaign per language? i.e. We have 4 products and thus 4 campaigns. If we add a language we add 4 additional campaigns.

appreciate the point of view! And the Whiteboard Friday today was very timely for this as well. Highly recommend watching if you're looking for ways to do keyword research and how to incorporate it into specific pieces of content. #randprovides

Did you look specifically at the sites Patrick mentioned for link assessment? You can use Majestic for free for sites you control, which is great. However, if we are talking about "designed by" footer links, those are not going to be very valuable in any case, and should probably be nofollowed, anyway.

Great question! We do often see a positive correlation between the number of followed outbound links and higher rankings (though I'm not sure we've scientifically measured this recently). Anecdotally, we hear this often as well. Most famously when the NYTimes made external links "followed" which was followed by an increase in traffic/rankings.

Thank you for your answer Gary.

Hello, This was exactly my approach to this, and I feared it would be over optimization, however my top ranking competitor seems to be using both counties in their H1s as seen here:http://www.leifertlaw.com/ They also have a resources section linking to arguably pretty useful external links in their footer to links with nearly entirely duplicate content for each relevant town in their service areas: http://www.leifertlaw.com/delray-beach-criminal-lawyer-traffic-attorney.html This website's optimization should literally be illegal, and seems to be using tactics that are frowned upon...yet it is ranking on the first page for both our target counties. Should we still avoid using these methodologies?

When you have content of various kinds on your website it can pull in a lot of traffic from outside of your geographic service areas.  If you want to measure how much of this is "local" traffic and monetize the "non-local" traffic I would suggest using Google's DFP ad server. You can set it up on your pages to identify traffic from INSIDE of your geographic area and show those visitors your house ads.  Visitors OUTSIDE of your geographic area - who are not candidates for purchasing your service will be shown adsense ads or ads from some other network. After you have done this the reports available through Google's DFP ad server will let you know the amount of your traffic that is local, the number that clicked through to your sales pages, the amount that is beyond your geographic area, and the amount of bonus income that you earned from people in New Jersey or some other location where your service is irrelevant. Steep learning curve here, but over the next months and years you can earn a load of dough from people who will never spend a penny with you. If you are really smart, you can set up DFP to display ads for colleagues who own businesses in other parts of the country.  They should be willing to pay premium prices for impressions made by people who live in their service area.

I don't think so...We had owned the domains for several years and the bad links have just come up in webmaster tools recently.

Hahaha. I think you might have one of the few instances that I recommend something I generally don't recommend, which is a hreflang across domains. Now this is going to get complicated, so let me know if I miss something in my explanation. First, I normally would recommend that the client just use the English translation of the main site if the content won't change at all. But you can't due to the trademarked name. Second, it sounds like your client never intends on changing the content on the new site for the US audience and doesn't need to. I assume this means that there is no change in products/services and no reason for people to see different content between the France specific English version and this other English version. If there is any change in content, like imagery, messaging, adding, modifying or removing products or services, please let me know. That changes the answer. If there is no actual changes in content, none at all, and no reason for them, you'll want to use a cross domain hreflang. France-French bbb.com France-English bbb.com/en  English (separate brand) aaa.com I would use hreflang to show that bbb.com is translated to en-fr at bbb.com/en and en-us at aaa.com. That's how to deal with that situation, but if their site is a .com and there is some way to just offer their content in English, that will get results faster and be easier to maintain. With the setup you are considering, you would still need to work on promoting the new domain and that will take time. I hope this all made sense.

Great! Thank you. I have PM'd

Hi All, Thanks for the updates. We solved the issue by only add # to the url when changing from color. So initial load of the product is the clean url. Guess that is all we need to do to don't get penaltilized by Google.

try visiting the site now, It seems Godaddyhas fixed the issue

Hi there You can use tools like SEMRush or your Google Analytics location report (coupled with your search queries from Search Console) to do specific keyword research in different countries. I would also recommend looking into competitor research in different countries and read into international SEO to get the most benefits and opportunities. Hope this helps! Good luck!