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Hi Adam, It's very important to keep your listings and physical locations separate, as were they to merge accidentally, it could result in your contact details being mixed up, so typically, merging is something business owners want to avoid. Each Google+ Local page needs to be viewed as a separate entity, earning its own reviews.

Yes, it overwrites. Always download the old list and make changes before uploading again.

Hi Justin, Sounds like you already know what you're doing! I would proceed with exactly what you have said and wouldn't be worried at all about the loss of authority between redirecting to a URL without a / to a URL with a /. The loss of authority will be almost insignificant and you will not lose your rankings or organic traffic from from doing this.

Theoretically this is not a good strategy because the value of these links are minimal compared to links to domains hosted on other servers in different places. There is no technical penalty for this unless you are over abusing the quantity of links, but, the value of the links is extremely low.

I think that John Mueller confirmed that they are not using social signals as a factor as well. I believe personally believe that to be strictly true. That doesn't mean that at good social presence can't help you rank though.  A successful social presence will create other positive signals.  For instance if Google considered repeat visits to be a positive signal then this is a signal that comes as a by-product of a strong social presence. That all said, it probably isn't a brilliant use of resources to "do social" just for rankings.  Social media can bring targeted traffic and conversions, build brand loyalty, increase your reach etc. These are all good reasons to use social media.  If you are using it for those reasons then any benefit to rankings is a free extra.

After some tests in webmaster I see this - for first time download Googlebot need 1.2-1.6 ms, but all next download is below 0.5 ms. Maybe is problem with page cache?

Hi Ryan, Thanks about this Sir. So much help. Will also review the link you've provided me. Cheers, David

No problem, glad I could help! There are a few ways to view that info in GA, here is one method: Go to your Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns report Then, make sure the correct 'conversions' goal is selected (should be a dropdown in the Conversions section) Now, input the campaign name you created for the tracking URL into the filter input field. That field is right above the Conversions section of the report and has a small magnifying glass next to the input field (to the left of the 'advanced' link). That will allow you to only view the traffic coming from that campaign and its metrics. You can also simply click the campaign name if you see it among the list of campaigns.

How are your rankings in Google? Usually a site well optimized and ranking well in Google also does well in Bing. Do you have a Bing Webmaster Tools account? Sometimes Bing rejects sitemaps, you would get a message in your Webmaster Tools account.

Thanks. It was purely a theoretical question, just trying to get a better handle on the relative importance of different ranking factors.

Hi Anton, In my opinion, this situation is one in which I'd be recommending a complete audit of the website for its local and traditional SEO, content, links and off-site local search marketing. Here's a great place to start: http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit. In the space of a Q&A forum, no one is going to be able to do a thorough job of this, but I have some resources to share that I feel may be helpful to you in troubleshooting issues with the site and, also, improving it. First, discover if any obvious mistakes are being made by starting here: http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures http://searchengineland.com/citation-inconsistency-no1-issue-affecting-local-ranking-210643 http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/12/04/insidelocal-webinar-troubleshooting-local-ranking-issues/ https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en Next, be sure the website is utilizing basic Local SEO best practices: http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/onpage-optimization-local-seo-perfectly-optimized-local-page/ Next, dig into the numerous factors that make up local search rankings to determine how well your client is doing with the most important ones: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/11/13/insidelocal-webinar-local-ranking-factors-discussed/#watch Check out what experts are recommending as best Local SEO practices for the coming year: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-have-a-successful-local-seo-campaign-in-2015 http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/12/17/insidelocal-webinar-state-local-search-2015/ Keep current on changes that will indubitably roll out this year by following people who make it a habit of writing about these things. I recommend following Mike Blumenthal, Linda Buquet, Phil Rozek, Darren Shaw, Greg Sterling, authors as Search Engine Land who write about Local SEO and authors here on the Moz blog who do the same. This is a short list, there are lots of very great options out there for daily reading. Local SEO, in my opinion boils down to: Not violating Google's guidelines Avoiding obvious pitfalls Publishing the very best website you are capable of in your industry/geography, possibly earning links for the qulity of your content and having a strategy for ongoing content publication and that the basic SEO of the site is correct rather than problematic Ensuring your citations are in tiptop shape Social participation, if appropriate Keeping up with the news, because it's a given that there will be both minor and major changes that may impact your rankings and your strategy. I hope these resources are helpful!

Hey You can use the URL removal tool to expedite this and it is one of the few times that Google actually recommends you do so: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1269119?hl=en. Likewise, the URLs will eventually fall away but it can take some time. The most important thing here is to ensure the site is 100% protected going forwards and does not get reinfected. The pharma hack often has three backdoors in WP itself, a plugin and often the database. These can go for months without being called and suddenly, the site is reinfected again and they are getting better all the time at making this harder and harder to clean up. This is worth a read: http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/07/understanding-and-cleaning-the-pharma-hack-on-wordpress.html We often also see a second degree payload with some black hat SEO and outbound links on the site so even when you get rid of the main problem, you may have a few small residual problems. I would suggest an SEO audit, some pro active security and at very least review the outbound links from the site to make sure they are all legit (Screaming Frog is your friend here and it will show external links + linking page). Hope that helps! Marcus

Your gap will disappear if you get back into the News index. Best of luck!

With Screaming Frog you would need to crawl, generate, and submit the sitemap (or upload it to your server) whenever it changes (you add/remove a page).

thanks Ray, the site is lifereader. co.nz and the another good one would be california psychics.  the industry is quiet competitive so not sure they would join the discussion to tell us there tricks, although that would be great lol

Hmm, tough spot you're in there. When you create a new container in GTM it assigns a unique container ID for that container - I don't think there is a way to revert back to an already deleted container, unfortunately.

Thanks! Wish we had something as catchy as the Triangle out this way, but we don't. It looks like county-related keywords have enough traffic to make it worthwhile to make pages for them. And I hate messy menus, so they'll help in that regard, too.