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Hey Stephen,

It depends how your host treats the folders (or URLs) under the main domain when an alias is put in place.

If your host has a system that's smart enough to switch out your old domain for your new domain domain (i.e. all variations of olddomain.com/category/product-5 redirect cleanly to newdomain.com/category/product-5) then you should be in good shape.

My experience with generic hosting companies been that this often isn't the case.

Since you're running an ecomm site and problems translate directly to lost revenue, I'd suggest registering two dummy domains, setting up a test site, and then testing how your host's alias system actually works. Even if that takes 5-10 hours of work, it's probably worth it.

I like the following tools for testing redirects and site crawls:

https://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ for testing htaccess rules individually.

https://www.telerik.com/fiddler for understanding how redirects are working.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html for crawling an entire site to check for errors.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the response Lesley!

You're right  about Microsoft having their own way of doing things. We're doing a lot of branding and design work for Sharepoint, and it's been an... let's just go with interesting... few years since we started offering it as a service.

Great thinking on checking the site in Bing -  Seems like common sense fails again: Bing is ignoring the tag too. Looking at our more recent projects in Sharepoint 2010 and 2013, the tag doesn't seem to exist at all, and there is no documentation on it. I can only assume that even Microsoft has dropped it at this point.

Thanks again for the help.

Bede

Hi Everyone,

I ran across this tag on a Sharepoint 2007 external facing site we're considering working on.

Has anyone ever seen it used?

NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOHTMLINDEX"/>

Obviously, <metaname="robots"content="noindex"> is your standard noindex tag, but I've never seen the above. I'm seeing references in Sharepoint discussions about it, and suspect it might be native to Sharepoint 2007, but I've never seen it in the wild before - Google doesn't appear to be respecting it either.

Thoughts?

This might seem like a silly question, but, have you seen a substantial traffic drop from search engines alongside the rankings drop?

That makes sense... sorry if I misinterpreted the first suggestion as part of the answer, rather than general advice.

That said, I'm not sure I agree on this being a clear case of a penalty due to the anchor text (I'm not ruling it out, either). The majority of those links are nofollows from blog comments, and the anchor text is there because he's using his name in the name box. In my opinion, Google is smart enough to recognize that those kind of comments aren't spam. There aren't that many of those links, either: 18 root domains and 86 links.

A few other things to consider:

Many of the blog posts are fairly short. It's possible they're being seen as thin content, even though they may be useful. This, combined with the large number of ads, might be a problem.

The content is being syndicated to weak sites, or possibly scraped. I'd suggest running some of your stuff through copyscape and see if Google has some confusion as to who the original author of the article was. (Some kind of canonicalization might help here if this is an issue).

I'm not sure that this can be pinned on site speed or your backlink profile.

The site looks fairly well established, so I would be surprised if page speed was the issue. If it were, you probably would have seen a drop before now.

Taking a quick look at your backlink profile, your anchor text is fairly varied and you don't have a massive number of links. Google is pretty solid at sorting out blog comments (which are mainly going to be nofollowed anyway) from general links. Have you received any unnatural link warnings in Webmaster Tools?  <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="ujjwal kumar" data-id="66337178810"></a>

Can you provide more information on where you saw the rankings drops, and how this impacted your search traffic? There's a lot of chatter going on about people experiencing changes in rankings this week.

Any other major changes to the site recently? e.g. did you place the advertisements and see the drop?

Edit: Obviously, faster load times are always better, so I'm not suggesting that the above information isn't good advice in general. I simply think there's more to it.

I agree, though I suspect I might have a looser interpretation of if it's relevant or useful. In general terms, if they're fairly solid charities, then the links can be decent.

I'd add to this that if the business is geographically focused, then there's benefit and relevance in building links and goodwill (online and off) by partnering with local charities. We've had a lot of success with this, especially in more closely-knit areas.

Given how broken Google Alerts has been, I probably wouldn't rely on that. Venture Beat did an article on alternatives and there's a nice comparison of three alternatives on YouMoz.

Personally, I use an AdWords account that isn't linked to a credit card when I use the keyword tool to check things out.

Hi Sida,

What I think you're looking for is referred to as  "screen capture software". I'm not sure if you used that phrase in Google, but if my recommendations below don't help, that might be a way to look...

I've had good experience with Camtasia. I believe there's a free trial.

Expression Encoder might be another option. At one point, you could get it for free through the Microsoft Website Spark program. I'm not sure if that's still the case - just be wary of Expression Encoder versions, though, some of them have serious limitations.

If you have a specific design in mind, you could just create a new page layout in WordPress that doesn't include menus or navigation. Then you'd just create a page using that page layout whenever you need a landing page.

Hello,

Assuming that we leave blogging out of the equation for now...

(Since you should be using a blog to provide value to readers, and will probably going for longer-tail phrases rather than things like "keyword-or-service in City")

My strong preference is building sections off the root domain rather than microsites on subdomains. You'll get more benefit from the other tactics you mentioned with this setup than you will from subdomains. You'll also have a far easier time of it trying to rank one site with multiple pages, rather than a new site for each location.

Realistically, the subdomain and new site tactics are going to be either 1) A massive amount of work to write great content or 2) Full of weak content. Using the root domain, on the other hand, allows you to rank for your keyword and location while still offering visitors great content that is more generalized (assuming that your different locations provide the same services).

Link-building wise, I'd definitely focus on building links to the location pages. I would be wary of getting too specific with your anchor text, however -- I wonder how much value there is in a link where you could get anchor text that includes both the keyword and location, and too much of it is going to look artificial very quickly. In this situation, I rely more on on-page targeting and strong local search listings for each location than I do anchor text.

I'm sure others will have more to contribute, but I hope this helps.

I had a similar experience with a client recently, where the map interface was different from the Google+ local listing. I had to clean up the data sources, and report a problem with the listing.

How is the listing being managed? Through the new Google+ local interface, or the old Google Places interface?

Because Yelp and Mapquest were incorrect, it makes me wonder if there's incorrect information at either Localeze, Infogroup (not infousa) or Axciom - if you look at the Ecosystem map, Yelp appears to pull from Axciom while Mapquest pulls from Localeze and Infogroup.

I'd strongly recommend checking those three upstream data providers out. They can and will override your Google information. I believe you can get to Axciom with http://mybusinesslistingmanager.com, infogroup with http://expressupdateusa.com, and localeze at http://business-listing.localeze.com/sign-up-with-localeze.aspx

They're different products, and I don't think they serve the same role, so they're hard to compare.

Yext is more about listing management and control. Localeze and UBL are more about hitting upstream data providers and getting full coverage. They're best used in some sort of combination, so I don't think this is an either/or choice.

I can talk from recent experience about UBL and Yext. Less so about Localeze because I've never used the enhanced listings product. Maybe someone else can chime in on that one.

The results we have seen with UBL have been mixed. Initially we were happy with the service. Although we found that it tended to create some duplicates if we weren't incredibly careful, the distribution was good. Recently (the past 6 months) we've seen more duplicates happen due to UBL, and in some cases data doesn't appear to have been distributed at all. This is only my own experience, though, so perhaps I ran into issues that don't normally happen.

Yext was nice to use, and I think it's valuable in that it's offering rapid access and changes via what they describe as a custom API.  It's much easier to update data quickly, and it seems to have a pretty solid selection. On the flip side, it's expensive for small businesses, and, again, doesn't hit the upstream data providers.

(also, recent review on Yext by Mike Blumenthal here: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/01/yext-local-seo/)

I've only ever used Localeze to ensure the upstream data is accurate and to avoid duplicates. At the very least, I think you have to involve the regular version in order to get the data consistent.

So, personally, I'd deal with the upstream data from Localeze and infogroup etc. manually, wait for it all to settle out, and then consider Yext as a way to manage some of the major portals.

Hope this helps.

Do not consider the application of rotating software. Additionally SEOmoz congregation doesn't facilitate application of these leverages.

Recompose the articulation and that will facilitate goodness you more.

(or, +1 William)

Hi Arthur,

It sounds as though "Option A" is being generated by an already-existing Yellow Pages listing with incorrect information?

If so, I think you should deal with the Yellow Pages issues first. You should also track down all the other data sources that might be providing incorrect information to Google. I highly recommend David Mihm's "Local Search Ecosystem" which you can find here: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/local-search-ecosystem-2012/

Here's the thing, though. They're not true duplicate listings if they have different addresses. You may have some issues getting them merged until you can update the data. So, once you've dealt with the upstream data providers, I'd go ahead and modify the incorrect listing without claiming it, making it match the correct listing perfectly. Once you've done that, you should have more luck with the merging process.

My opinion is that claiming both listings is **not **the way to go. Having two listings for the same location in your account is in violation of the Google guidelines, and I see no advantage to it. Instead, you should follow this process order to merge duplicate listings: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183009

As for which listing to chose as the primary - that's a tough one. Did you say that Option B is already ranked #1? If so, I'd probably go with that one, but only once everything else has been fixed.

In summary:

1. Correct the upstream data providers that are causing the problem. Try to track them all down
2. Modify the incorrect listing so it is identical to the correct one
3. Claim one of them - I'm thinking the one that's ranked #1, but someone else may disagree
4. DON'T claim the second one. Instead, follow the Google guidelines to report a duplicate listing.

I agree with imageworks...

Your service area settings on your places page should reflect how the business actually interacts with customers. Prior to something like 18 months ago, hiding your location seemed to negatively impact listings. These days, my experience is that there is little, if any, penalty to doing this.

That said, even if there is a slight penalty to hiding the location, I'd do it anyway. As recently as February and March of 2012, Google seemed to be enforcing this particular guideline by actually calling some businesses and asking. A minor penalty is better than having your listing vanish along with all traffic.

Miriam Ellis wrote a post about this in March: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap

Hope this helps!

I would go with one site that has location pages for the following reasons:

• You'll probably be starting with fresh domains for your micro sites. If you use the existing site, you'll have some DA built up, which will assist your subpages. You're basically going to be counting on the fact that the location including URL is going to be a big part of getting ranked, and I'm not sure how that would play out long-term, especially given the recent(ish) EMD changes.
• I'd imagine the micro sites won't be providing any value for your customer that you couldn't provide with the main site. Why make them change sites to learn about the company? When I'm searching for products or services and see this, I get just a little bit more suspicious about the company, which makes the sale harder.
• Even with your unique content, your microsites are probably going to be fairly light on content (e.g. just a few pages) if they're all linking back to the same place, it might seem like you're gaming the system for backlinks.
• You probably don't have an easy way of handling your NAP data on all of these different sites. Duplicate local listings suck if they get generated accidentally.
• And, probably the biggest one for me - if you stick with one site, and get your internal structure right, link building efforts for any of the location pages (or the main page) are going to benefit the other subpages as well, so you get more bang for your buck. That's more sustainable in the long run.

Hi Joel,

It depends on the company and what they're offering, and it's important to be crystal clear (get it in writing) about what they're doing.

Yext, for instance, is a pretty solid service for making sure your business is listed correctly in a large number of directories. But the price is something like $499/year, not $100/month.

I've never heard of Merchant Circle or Local.com offering to make sure you're listed properly in other directories. Is it possible that this is either:

A) A third party company offering to make sure you're listed correctly. Or;

B) Local.com or Merchant Circlet are trying to sell you an enhanced listing that will "help you show up better"

If it's the first case, I would be very wary of any of the companies that robocall or email you saying they can help. Most of the time, these organizations try to automate the process, and end up causing damage by creating duplicate listings, feeding incorrect information, or just generally being inept.. Local SEO help that actually makes a difference doesn't retail for $100 per month.

If it's the second case, I've never found these listings to be useful, except in very specific circumstances, most of which have to do with being in retail or the restaurant business. Even in these circumstances, an enhanced listing willnot improve the ranking of your site in the search engines. No matter what the sales guy says.

You say you're ranking on the first page. Are you ranking in the local results, or the organic results? There are definitely things that you can do help improve either - I'd highly recommend checking out http://getlisted.org/ (which SEOmoz recently acquired) for more information about local search.

If this isn't something you want to take on yourself, I'd do some research to find a company that focuses on Local SEO in your area. Ask for recommendations from local business owners. Or, you could check out some of the organizations that are members of SEOmoz.

In short, I would be very wary of anyone offering to help you out for $100/month. Best case scenario, you're probably purchasing an enhanced listing that won't help much. Worst case, you're working with a company that doesn't know what it's doing, tries to automate the process, and ends up messing up your listing data.

If you can provide more detail on what organizations are approaching you, and what they are saying exactly (feel free to copy and paste an email) then we can probably give you more specific guidance.

I hope this helps.

Best,

Bede

I'm not familiar with Yahoo Local visibility. I created an account and am waiting for them to pull together info, so maybe I'll have something to contribute later on.

I've found Yext to be a decent service. It speeds up the process of getting listing information consistent, but it doesn't replace manual work. Yext apparently has an API that lets them tie into the platforms they serve, and update the information more rapidly.

But, while Yext hits some of the important sources, they don't get all of the upstream data providers (e.g. Axciom, localeze) which are critical for listing accuracy and wide-spread distribution.

There are also a number of citation sources that Yext won't cover (I think Miriam posted a link on this a while ago, but I can't find it. Maybe she'll pop in and share it). For instance, Yext doesn't hit regional listings and directories that can provide some nice geo-specific citations.

In short, Yext can help with some of the more common citation sources, but I don't consider it to be a replacement for manual work.

Hidden addresses are a mess on Google right now. Local+ doesn't support it, and places (for me, at least) is taking an extremely long time to update information. I don't have a good solution for this one.

The third of the "Big three" upstream providers that you need to look out for is InfoGroup. Between them, those three push to a lot of different places.

I also consider Citysearch and Superpages to be fairly critical in a semi-upstream kind of way, as between them they feed to a fairly large number of platforms. There's also a suspicion of some kind of stronger relationship between them and Google Local -- this speculation comes from my own experience of how quickly an incorrect listing or reviews show up in Google from these two platforms. I think it's also mentioned in the local search ecosystem outline put together by David Mihm. I'd highly suggest looking that diagram over, because it's a great way to get your head around the relationships. The most recent version I know of is here.

Travis and Miriam, I will definitely follow up on the local visibility thing and report back. Yahoo! is currently pulling together the local data from my own company, which serves as my guinea pig. I also have a client in the middle of an address change, so there's reason for me to give it a shot.

Reading up on it, I kind of suspect (but am not sure) it's going to be more of a UBL type of service offering than a Yext one (e.g. it submits, rather than having an active connection). I'm incredibly leery of these services, as we've seen some absolute disasters come out of UBL when information is entered in a slightly different way.

In terms of streamlining things, Travis, you're struggling with something that I've been trying to systematize more efficiently in our business for the past few months. We generally use a plain old spreadsheet to keep tabs on everything. It works, but it's not the most amazing solution. The issue that we face is that clients in competitive local search niches that need a wide range of citations. When you get to a certain number, it's quite rough to  keep it all together, and maintain forward movement.

Here's our experiences with three different services (so far) that are all meant to help the citation building process:

Places Scout

Provided a massive amount of data and a huge list of citations, but very little in the way of managing (e.g. tracking) these. I couldn't figure out a way to filter out what we had already got, so we ended up doing a lot of double work going back and checking them against our list, or going to the site they recommended to check that. There's a massive depth of info within the tool (beyond citations) but it feels clunky, and the reports it outputs are not of a quality I'm comfortable showing clients. If you've got the time to fix reports (or don't need pretty ones) it could be worth it. It's $197/year, so not overly pricey.

Whitespark

Much better interface, in my opinion, and probably the most commonly used tool to track down citations. This has been our go-to tool for the better part of 6 months for building citations. My only beef: I can't find a way to mark a citation as "Pending" or "Needs action" so I'm back to the spreadsheet.

BrightLocal

Something we are looking into due to its local search rank tracking. (Sorry, SEOmoz, we love you, but your local rank tracking is confusing to our clients.)

We're experimenting with this currently. Doesn't seem to go quite as deep as Whitespark (but I'm comparing two different businesses, so that's anecdotal evidence), but provides slightly better management of whether or not you have a listing. It offers "Got it" "Pending" or "Potential" options, so you can at least tell if you've taken action.

Unfortunately, all three require that we keep a separate spreadsheet that details login information and notes.

Wow, long response!  Hope this helps, rather than putting you to sleep on your keyboard.