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This is really tremendous, Dirk. Thank you so much!

I'd take the Simon Sinek approach to this -- to ask you why is you/your client interested in this workaround for Hubspot? What do you gain by keeping it on the subdomain? What would you lose? Assuming most people here would agree the important factors (as SEO technologists) in order are: Is the site reachable? Is the site readable? (googlebot et al) To date, (from what Hubspot has communicated with us)  there is yet to be any way to set up Google Webmaster tools legitly, without creating two sites (seemingly competing for the same keywords) for both the 'blog.website.com' and the 'website.com' as one would do for a typical 'www.website.com' sub-domain (google has you choose the primary and it's also indicated in analytics). Assuming it's similar to my client work/experience, your client wants wants: Hubspot data CTA buttons landing pages Thus far, I don't see any reason any site should use the Hubspot platform w/ subdomain.  The true alternative is setting up wordpress as one normally would, then installing the Hubspot plugin.  So far (about six months) this has done the job. Before we made this change for our clients we were constantly running into issues which caused me to question the legitimacy of a tool, even a company, that encourages site set-up / blog settings, that contradict what GWC (Google Webmaster Central) has advice their community.  Furthermore, seemingly sees no issue/s with all the above, including the challenge of setting up a site with a secure cert added after a site has been set up on Hubspot.  Again, 'httpS' causes issues with their 'sub-domain' approach to the blogging aspect, even to the extent they have told my client that they would have to re-purchase the secure cert from them to make the 'marketing' subdomain also secure.  So far, their organic search traffic is up by 7,000+%. Interested in what others are doing as well.  It has been quite a journey but certainly a learning experience.  Cheers to learning!

Hi Peter I personally love local tracking - especially for clients I have that tend to serve certain cities or areas, and don't compete nationally in their industry. If you find some of your clients or websites aren't meant to rank and perform nationally, then I highly suggest focusing on local SERP performance. Just keep in mind that adding local keywords to track also takes away spots from your overall allotted keywords you can track in your campaigns - just be mindful! You can learn more here from Moz. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hey there! From what I can see, everything looks like it's set up correctly. Here are the instructions to create a G+ custom URL for a business. Let me know if you're still running into any troubles!

Hi Ravi, To check if the rich snippets appeared in the results I checked in  google using site:urbandazzle.com - for the screen copy I did the following quary: "Devnow Bar" site:urbandazzle.com (not quite the typical search request your normal customers would type) Hope this helps, Dirk

Jamie & Aaron nailed it. Some additional links to consider: sitemap, email (mailto:), address (hyperlink to location), CTA, phone number (tel:) and etc.

Everything he said... Patrick was way more articulate!

Yes I would, I would overlay those images with text, and mark them up using good html5 semantics and schema.org. don't make it hard for the search engine to work out what you page is trying to do. describe your data well so that the search engine knows just when your trying to say.

Subdomains are seperate from your root domain SEO. I guess that you do not want search engines to discover the new site? Deploy a noindex tag on the site to make sure that it is not indexed in the search engines. However, if you place it in a subfolder on your site (e.g. domain.com/site/) I will affect the overall impression of the site from a search engines perspective. You could take a look at the Moz guide about domains (it could help you understand the difference in subdomains and root domains in respect to SEO): http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain

Thanks Dirk for your great in-depth response! I will now check with developers what the estimated effort would be. Making the canonical URL available will let me sleep better at night before releasing the new site version. I think the risk shouldn't be huge if we cannot do this and will not waste too many ressources on this (unless, of course, we see a negative impact, which I will then report here;) Best,  Phil

Yes use noindex, follow for that

Hi, This company appears to only do US and Europe. Is there a tool that can do Australia at a efficient price?

Actually I believe the "most correct" answer to this is - do not use meta keywords if your main search engine is Google. If you are trying to rank on Baidu, 360, Yandex or other search engines it may help you (but don't overspam.) The generic advice of "don't do it" disregards the possibility of optimising for other engines as most English-speaking work is done for Google. Otherwise, agree with the two other answers you've received. Just be aware of your goals and you'll be fine.

Obviously Dirk is right but again you will lose the opportunity to rank in search engines from the related key phrases and if you have played around with real estate industry before, you will have an idea about how difficult it is to rank and what are the advantages of ranking for that particular term. In my opinion, duplication on page works like when the page is 60 to 70% identical to another page on the website and this is exactly what is happening in your case. I do agree the fact that you cannot change the descriptions but you can actually add the section on the page that explain more about the property. A custom box where you can include your custom written content. I agree it’s a lot of work at your end but at the end of the day you will get a chance to rank well for those important key phrases that can offer you great amount of conversions. Just a thought!

Majestic Historic Index shows 207 links from 23 domains. You have links out there but OSE hasn't picked them up.  This is mainly a matter of discovery and index size.  The OSE index simply is about 10% of Majestic. I had a lengthy reply to Rand about this here: http://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk#comment-328141 What you're seeing is a combination of having only a few live links and OSE's limits.

Thanks, yeah this is where its confusing for me trying to learn about back links The website is super relevant, it doesnt "look" spammy, other companies in my industry as registered here..... hummm seo fun Thanks

Just be sure that I understand what you're saying: On pages like https://modli.co/dresses/elegant.html & https://modli.co/dresses.html you want to use rel next/rel previous. On pages like https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=43&size=25 you plan to use a canonical to https://modli.co/dresses.html Seem like a good strategy - the only minus is that you would not have a corresponding landing page for somebody looking for "red dress" (page exist on site but points to the generic dresses page). Not sure if these type of queries represent a search volume & if they would be important for your business. rgds, Dirk PS You should check the H1 you use on your pages - on https://modli.co/dresses/elegant.html the H1 is "Elegant" - would be much better if it would be "Elegant dresses"