Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I appreciate the advice...

I haven't had a penalty notice from google, so when  i used the DISAVOW tool (which i did after trying to contact the site owners, with no joy) there was no option for me to submit my defence and prove to google my efforts my end before using the DISAVOW as a last resort.

If you have a link which i can follow to take me to the relevant place where i can submit my proof of efforts I would be grateful. I haven't taken a massive drop like I know some people have, it's mild but lets be honest - nobody really looks past page 1 and i'm floating around page 2-3 in a lot of areas where I was on the first page and loving life

Hi Miriam...

I found the local listings article very interesting, quite frightening in fact. It all makes sense but you have put a lot of things back into perspective.

Hi Miriam

I've got physical addresses for the areas. A google postcard has been sent to the area to authorise.

I'm not bothered if i rank on the first page locally or organically.

My concern with the URL was if i have 60 URL's saying /driving-lessons-AREA

Would that not dilute dilute each areas strength because of the heavy use of driving lessons and also dilute my home page optimisation which is for the whole of the UK for driving lessons.

As for links, i've had a good clean up around 2 months ago but it seems the disavow tool takes time as these horrible links are still present in my webmaster links to site section.

It's weird i have another website that is spammed to hell, bad links and poor content and that sits on the first page of local listings and i've done no work on it since the penguin update - as there was too much to do and i had other priorities.

All i've tried to do with my main site is good seo practice.

So you think the driving-lessons for every area page shouldn't make a difference ?

I run a driving school of over 100 instructors in the UK. We cover around 60 different areas.

My homepage www.driveJohnsons.co.uk is optimised for 'driving lessons' and 'driving school' search terms mainly.

My area pages are optimised for the same but with the area included ie: Driving Lessons Birmingham or Driving Lessons Leeds

I've taken a drop in many areas...

I've cleaned up my incoming links using the disavow too and upped more relevant links associated with the same industry as myself.

The question i have is should i change my URL's for my area pages from www.driveJohnsons.co.uk/driving-lessons-leeds to: www.driveJohnsons.co.uk/leeds

I've been told stuffing the URL with keywords for an area actually dilutes the strength of my homepage and all the other areas.

At the moment i have 60 area pages with: www.drivejohnsons.co.uk/driving-lessons-area

It use to work a treat, but i've started seeing some companies change their URLs to: /area and excluding the driving-lessons

If i make this change then i'm either going to have to bit the bullet on build up links for those areas again or do a redirect for each area.

I've added most areas to google places and i've added google map to many of area pages too.

If anyone knows a bit more, please let me know...

Hi

I'm tidying up my site and had a few questions ref: use of headings.

1. My previous SEO company use to reduce the font size for headings, this seems a bit black hat to me ? Is this okay? For example heading text as font 6 and paragraph text as font 12.

2. If my key search term is 'driving lessons in London' and my second key search term is 'Driving Schools London', Is it better to have my H1 as: Driving Lessons London & H2 as: Driving Schools London

OR

H1: Quality Driving Lessons in London by driveJohnson's

H2: How our driving school in London can help you:

In my opinion the 2nd one reads better and i notice other companies doing it the second way, the first way i mentioned seems a bit old school and doesn't read well ?

3. Is it worth using H3 & H4 ? Can you use H2 more than once ?

4. Lastly could i have two key search terms within one heading, as long as the paragraph underneath is about the heading. For example:

H1: Our driving school in London offers cheap driving lessons

The two keywords search phrases here for me would be driving schools London and driving lessons london.

If someone could get back to me, i would be very grateful.

@Sida

But what sort of description do you write for: http://www.drivejohnsons.co.uk/2012/04 ??

"Welcome to driveJohnson's april 2012 category where you can find all of our articles that were written in 2012/04 to do with driving news and and advice"

It seems like an unnecessary page in my opinion that has over 200 on page links

@ Braden... Thanks

Is there a way where i can clean up my Blog a bit more? Which ultimately would make it more user friendly too ?

In an ideal world I would like someone to click on my blog see the various categories and if they click on a category they can choose an article.

Would cutting out the date categories reduce URLS like this: http://www.drivejohnsons.co.uk/2012/11

Hi i'm new to MOZ, after sacking my SEO consultant due to the penguin update. My site position isn't fantastic right now for my national and local search terms

The first problem i have is tackling too many on page links. I understand it should be 100 or less, unless users would benefit more. Looking at my links i have up to 200 on page links (which i know are not beneficial or user friendly).

If i give you an example this page has 208 links: http://www.drivejohnsons.co.uk/blog/page/3

Heres another one with 157 links: http://www.drivejohnsons.co.uk/author/admin/page/2

Here's one that isn't associated with my blog that has 188 links: http://www.drivejohnsons.co.uk/testimonials

On average most pages excluding the blog have around 120 links per page and i know thats to do with my Nav Bar - which i will sort out.

My question is: Because the majority of these high link pages are associated with my blog, will that affect my site SEO performance?

If yes, does anyone have any suggestions as to how i can reduce the total links on each page within my blog?

The more i blog, this number is only going to increase

Im using wordpress. I was just wondering if any of these imports would help ?

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Blogger

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Install the Blogger importer to import posts, comments, and users from a Blogger blog.

Blogroll

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Install the blogroll importer to import links in OPML format.

Categories and Tags Converter

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Install the category/tag converter to convert existing categories to tags or tags to categories, selectively.

LiveJournal

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Install the LiveJournal importer to import posts from LiveJournal using their API.

Movable Type and TypePad

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Install the Movable Type importer to import posts and comments from a Movable Type or TypePad blog.

RSS

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Install the RSS importer to import posts from an RSS feed.

Tumblr

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Install the Tumblr importer to import posts & media from Tumblr using their API.

WordPress

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Install the WordPress importer to import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags from a WordPress export file.

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If anyone can help, i would very grateful.