Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks a lot Troy.

Hi guys,

I've been struggling trying to find average conversion rates for qualified traffic (e.g. PPC) for lead generation/phone calls in the B2B  services(non- SaaS) environment. I know that it varies depending on the industry, but having at least an idea would help us a lot.

Any information you can provide would be very valuable. Thanks a lot.

So Mr King, would it be reasonable to say that personalizing all locations but California would keep us out of trouble?

Thanks Mike!

Thanks for your insights Dirk.

Hi both,

Thanks a lot for your ideas and suggestions. No doubt it's a tough subject. I don't really understand Google's position about this, on one hand they want you to provide a better user experience (what can be done through personalization) and on the other hand they don't seem to be providing reasonable solutions to potential SEO drawbacks.

Dirk, referencing this line of yours "What you could do is automatically redirect the user to the appropriate page based on ip - but still have the other pages accessible via normal links", don't you think if the user is directly redirected to the "location based-page" then the Google bot coming from California (as an example) will also be redirected to it and then understand that the website is targeting California?

I read something at Unbounce regarding dynamic text replacement that caught my attention http://documentation.unbounce.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661004-Dynamic-Text-Replacement-pro-

They say “It's always been possible with Unbounce to do text replacement using a little bit of JavaScript, but unfortunately the bots and crawlers that Google (and other ad networks) use to validate your landing page quality don't read Javascript.”

If the fact that the bots cannot read Javascript is true maybe using Javascript for small personalization actions such as changing the location-based text maybe the solution. I wonder if this follows google guidelines or not.

Again I'll appreciate your answers; I'll go through all the links and information and keep investigating. I really need to find some technically supported facts.

Thank again. Ana

Hi guys,

I'm just testing a personalization software in our website, basically changing the "location" text depending on the user's IP.

I can see in my software that when the Google bot comes to our site the personalization software  triggers an action changing the location based text to "California". Can this make Google understand that our website targets only users in California and thereof  hurt our rankings in other locations nationwide?

I'll appreciate your opinions.

I doubt blocking countries can have any negative effect on your SEO. Like in your case our company's customers are located only in US. We have blocked many foreign countries for exactly the same reasons you name and never had any negative effects on our SEO work due to the IP blocks. It's more...you may actually see a decrease in your website's bounce rates what is supposed to be good for your ranks.

Thanks for answering. If that is the case , is there any legal action that can be taken against the blackmailer?

Hi all,

Yesterday I was checking out ahrefs.com and realizing that one of our main competitors was getting new spammy links to its website from junk directories, rusian forums, porn sites etc. I found it to be weird but I thought that maybe they hired a black hat company without knowing it.

Today I began finding the same type of spammy links pointing to our site. I'm completely sure we did not create them.I was checking out some of the new directory links and their listings consist of new pages including only our company's website and absolutely no descriptions. I did a little more research and find out that many of those new directories/listings belong to the same company ( seems to be located in Argentina, but I'm not sure). I also remembered paying that company long time ago to delete two links to our website that were included in their directories.

I have to tell you, I'm completely out of my mind and I really don't know what to do. The two possibilities I can think about are:

1- A competitor has hired somebody to point spam to our site, to our other competitor, and may be some other competitors in the industry.(because as I tell you before our main competitor in the area is getting new spammy links too)

2- These black hat companies that own directories and other junk websites are pointing spam to us to get paid to remove links.

Whether is #1 or #2 is getting out of control and I really don't know how to manage it (except from disvowing links as soon as I find them).

I would appreciate suggestions/advise. Thanks.

Ana

Hi guys,

I'm just testing a personalization software in our website, basically changing the "location" text depending on the user's IP.

I can see in my software that when the Google bot comes to our site the personalization software  triggers an action changing the location based text to "California". Can this make Google understand that our website targets only users in California and thereof  hurt our rankings in other locations nationwide?

I'll appreciate your opinions.