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If you want to target users from US, Japan, Mexico, etc. do not set your country as Spain in GWT. Instead, don't set a country at all.

We've done some testing around Magento hosting, and our conclusion was that you'll see significant performance increases by hosting on a powerful VPS instead of shared hosting. In the testing we did, we used a KnownHost SSD VPS, and saw 50-100% increases in page load speeds compared to shared hosting. That's what I would suggest - a KnownHost SSD VPS.

I've seen a quote from Matt Cutts suggesting absolute (full) URLs, but that quote is from 10 years ago. I'm pretty sure that no longer applies.

Absolute or relative URLs are 100% fine for SEO. Full URLs may offer a small benefit in that content scrapers may end up linking to your site if they steal your content.

Google is getting much better at recognizing location, but I would still work to include it on the page in a few places. That's what I've seen the best results doing. My recommendation:

• Include the location in the title tag.
• Include the location in the H1 or at the top of the page - this is for the user as much as for search engines, to reaffirm to the user that they are on the website of a local company.
• You don't have to use the exact keyword + location phrase - mix it up and be natural. For example, "We're a roofing company serving Portland and the surrounding area of Maine."
• Include the location (eg city name) and state at least 2x on the page.
• Use schema.org markup on your physical address in the footer, sidebar, or elsewhere on the page.
• Don't include the location in anchor texts in your navigation - that looks rather spammy.

I've never seen any evidence that .org links are inherently more valuable than .com or other links. (I've not seen any evidence that .edu links are inherently better, either.)

This post from and this video Matt Cutts seem to imply that the TLD is not a significant factor in ranking.

I think this whole idea that links from certain TLDs (eg .edu) started because people took a true statement (eg "most .edu websites are high authority websites with strong editorial control) and extrapolated that into ".edu links are inherently more authoritative". Mediocre SEO's then latched onto this idea, because they found they could easily get .edu links through blog comments and sell them for a premium by claiming they are more powerful. What you actually had is people building outright spam links and claiming they are great just because they are on an .edu domain.

I analyze .edu and.org links just like I would any other link - relevance, authority of domain, authority of page, editorial strength, etc.

Wow, that Google solution was staring me right in the face, wasn't it!? Thanks!

I have been finding some good stuff in Fresh web explorer.

Let's say I want to find blog posts posted in the past week or so about "key west". These posts could be on a personal blog, travel blog, etc.

Google News is mostly news sites (not blogs) and Google blog search doesn't work any more. What other good options are there?

So far Open site Explorer Just Discovered is the best option I've found, but there is a lot of other stuff mixed in with a few blog posts.

Thanks for the reply. Why do you say "You'll be fighting a steep uphill battle if you try to optimize one URL for all three."?

That's what I tend to think also, but to my knowledge Google hasn't ever discouraged this, and I've seen this approach work pretty well for two different websites.

What good/bad experiences have people had trying to optimize a single URL for multiple locations in different states? eg optimizing a page of the site for "dentist atlanta", "dentist orlando", and "dentist miami" (the client has offices in all these locations).

Has anyone found that Google has an algorithm that get's suspicious if you try to optimize a given URL for either too many locations and/or for locations that are too far apart?

We have a client site (a dentist) that has 10 locations and 20+ services (braces, teeth whitening, cosmetic dentistry, etc, etc.). We're trying to figure out the ideal approach to optimally cover all their locations and services, but each option we consider has drawbacks:

1. Optimize service pages for service name + each location name (or at least the biggest location names), with service name and location names in the title tag. That results in a too long title tag, plus possible user confusion, since they are searching for "braces richmond" but the title tag lists other cities, some of which are in a different state.
2. Optimize service pages for service name + each location name, but don't include the locations in the page title. This is the current option being used, but it appears to be hurting the rankings at least a bit not having the location name in the page title.
3. Create a page for each service + location combo. That will be 200+ pages, which will mean the pages will be deeper in the site, with less link juice.
4. Create new domains for each location/state covered. But then we have to start over building link juice.

How have other sites dealt with this? What has worked best and what hasn't worked?

Got this issue fixed. The issue was that robots.txt was blocking the Javascript file that does the redirect, so Google couldn't see the redirect.

To handle the redirect to the mobile site. Sounds like the JavaScript this client had in place isn't working correctly.

You would get a 200 response...the redirect is JavaScript, not server side. Maybe we should change that? Do you have a WP plugin you recommend?

The redirect was setup by a previous vendor, but I've not noticed any issues with them.

Thanks. The Google doc is what we were using as our guide to set up the code on the homepage. So you're saying that the main site homepage should pass the mobile friendly test tool if we have it set up right? URL is arcticair4me.com

NM the URL is arcticair4me.com

Yeh, that's the doc we followed in setting up the code on the homepage. I'll PM you the URL.

One of our clients has a separate mobile site, and we've setup the rel="alternate" on the main site homepage, but https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ still fails the site (it checks the main site, instead of the mobile site) when we put in the main site URL. Is there any way to check that we've got everything setup correctly? (We have a lot of experience with mobile responsive sites, but not so much with separate URLs.)

Thanks, but your answer gives basic local SEO tactics, and doesn't answer my question. My question is what to do when a competitor is shown in the Knowledge Graph for a generic search (they should only be showing in the knowledge graph if they are searched for by name). For some reason Google is confusing the generic keyword with this company's name, it seems.