Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Cesar,

It might be too late, but you should check to see if Google has even crawled that page yet (check out the cache, and whether or not your changes are showing up in the SERPS).

Can you be specific about what you mean by "Meta titles"? Do you mean title tags?

Title tags will certainly have an effect on your ranking. Meta descriptions and keywords will not (though the former will certainly affect click-through rates).

If you are talking about title tags, can you tell us what you changed them to? and what they were before?

Are there any other issues or changes that might affect rankings? For which phrases did the rank drop happen?

Hi Yvonne,

You're talking about three very different services when you look at Localeze vs. UBL vs. web-listings.net

Localeze and UBL are local-search oriented. They focus on distributing core business NAP (Name, address, phone) information to local search providers.

Getting this information consistent and widely distributed is critical for local search rankings. Both UBL and Localeze well-respected platforms that offer a solid and important service. There are nuances which make them different, but for the purposes of this discussion, they're both a way to get your NAP out to maps and local search providers.

Services like web-listings.net are completely different. They're offering to "submit your website URL to 20 Search Engines with up to 8 keywords or key phrases." this is, in my opinion (and I believe a widely shared one) outdated and a waste of time, if not downright harmful.

So what are you trying to do here? Get directory listings for backlinks to your site? Or distribute NAP information to the local search providers, to rank in local search?

I agree with Jeremy. If they don't want to list their home address, and don't have an address they can serve people at, like an office, then hide it. Google seems to be calling more often recently to see if businesses can serve people at the location listed.

Luckily, there no longer seems to be a ranking penalty for hiding your address. http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/11/03/google-places-search-hiding-address-no-longer-buries-listing/

Hi David,

Can you clarify what you mean by "Sit under"?

Do you want the places listing to display barrettsteel.com as the web address?

Or, do you want the listing to show barettsteel.com as the web address and show up above the "normal" (non-local) result?

I'd check out whether Google still has the linking pages cached before making a decision (at least some of them). If Google has recrawled them since they went "dead" you may not have a decision to worry about

Are the sites completely irrelevant and spammy, or decent but completely off topic?

Hi George,

I recently had a bad experience with a related posts plugin - I had a client site go down for a few hours, and had to deactivate it because it was causing too much CPU load. Apparently most related posts plugins run multiple queries multiple times, which is hard on the server.

(Maybe someone with more server/MySQL experience can provide a good explanation as to why this is).

I ended up going with the "Efficient Related Posts" plugin as a replacement. It seems to be working fine so far, and we've had no more issues with CPU usage. It sounds like it will do what you want as well:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/efficient-related-posts/

This is only based on my experience, though, so please take the recommendation with a grain of salt - test first!

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the response. I did check the rank tracking software when I saw it, and unfortunately it's not what's causing the problem.

It's not causing massive traffic changes to the site - somewhere in the realm of 5% to 15% depending on the month. It's still a decent chunk of people, though.

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!

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.

About two months ago we dealt with some issues that were causing weak rankings in Bing and Yahoo! since then, we've seen rankings rise and plummet dramatically with no changes to the site.

On Bing and Yahoo! we've gone from 1st page to less than 50th and back again THREE times. This happens across all keywords, even branded ones that are an exact-match for the domain.

Google rankings have continued to rise steadily. We benefited greatly from Penguin, which tanked a number of competitors.

Bing webmaster tools aren't showing any server or other kinds of errors during the rank drops.

Has anyone every experienced this before?

If you can nail down a date that you saw a specific rankings drop, it would help to diagnose the issue - 24th is when Penguin rolled out. I believe the most recent Panda version happened on the 19th. Anything before that may have been Panda, too.

Would you be comfortable sharing the URL?

Out of interest, when did your rankings drop?

We just got a new client because of recent Penguin/Panda changes.

A national "SEO"  firm decided it was a good idea to set up a page for each service town or county they serve with nothing but duplicate content. Needless to say, on the week of the 23rd, their rankings tanked from 1st page (it's not a competitive niche) to 4th.

I'm not bringing this up to brag, but rather because it got me thinking...

How are your geographically targeted "service area" pages doing? Have the recent changes caused you to rethink your geographic targeting in any way?

I've always gone with Xenu, though I've heard good things about the already-mentioned Screaming Frog.

Dr. Pete did a nice comparison last year of the two:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog

Someone might disagree with me, but I don't think it will be an issue. To some extent, it seems to me that what you're describing happens pretty regularly anyway.

Take, say, the Thesis theme for WordPress. Hundreds or even thousands of people use it. I'm sure there are businesses out there that use the same basic navigation (Home, About Us, Services, Contact) and who don't customize it very much. That means that the only significant difference is the content. I haven't ever heard of this being a problem.

A similar (though not identical) situation occurs sites my company develops for our clients  We start the coding on many of them with the TwentyTen/Eleven themes, as they provide a solid base. While the sites look totally different, the core pieces of the code, the majority of the classes and ID's, the HTML structure, are the same. The only real difference is the CSS. Again, because they're small/medium businesses, they often have very similar navigation structure. So far we haven't had any trouble ranking them.

Anecdotal evidence that doesn't fit your situation perfectly, I know, but my gut feeling is that you'll be fine so long as the content is unique.

From a user experience, you might want to consider at least convincing him to change any photos out. Nothing says cloned site like identical images.

Hi hfranz,

Totally frustrating to find pages like that, isn't it? If I read your response right, you can't find where those rogue "Page" pages are being linked to from, so you can't fix the problem?

You could try and give it a crawl with Xenu (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html). It should be able to tell you which pages are linking to the rogues.

Once the crawl has run (tell it you don't need a report) right click on the links you want to dig into, and select "URL Properties". At the bottom of the window that pops up, it will say "# Pages Linking To This One" and give you a list of the URLs that link to that page.

e.g. find www.example.com/blog/page/13/ on the results, right click > URL Properties and then look for the pages that link to it. If you're having trouble seeing the link visually, then view source and ctrl+F (or the Mac equivalent) to find it.

It's a place to start tracking down the problems, at least. Someone more familiar with Yoast will have to chime in on how to fix it (if it's a Yoast problem) but you could always just remove the links to the rogue pages, since they don't sound critical.

Hope this helps!

Hi Again,

The (Not provided) category isn't showing up in March 2011 because they only started obscuring data from logged in users in October of 2011. This might account for at least some of the traffic difference between 2011 and 2012.

I think this is the blog post that they announced the change via:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html

You can potentially get some idea of what terms the (not provided) traffic is coming in on by looking at the landing page. You can also use PPC data, but I'm a little fuzzier on how that is done as AdWords isn't something I use a whole lot of.

Have you looked into long-tail traffic yet, or the traffic being generated by (not provided) search terms?

I've found word clouds to be useful at analyzing changes in long-tail traffic. If you can pull April and  March search terms into two different spreadsheets, then use something like Wordle you can get a really generalized overview of your long-tail makeup.

Similar to RankSurge's answer - The other thing you might want to consider is if the format of the SERPs has changed. Are there video, photo, local, or other universal results-or rich snippets-that didn't used to show up alongside your site?

I think you should be good leaving it alone, then.

You could put rel=canonical on the post page only (don't put it on the tags or category pages) but that might be more trouble than it's worth, depending on the restrictions imposed by the CMS.

Hi Pantelis,

I think that whether or not this is a problem, and how it should be fixed, depends on how your blog is set up.

The guide Justin mentioned is a good resource. Before you jump in, I think you should consider these questions:

When you go to domain.com/blog/seo etc. are the posts excerpted, or are full posts being displayed?

When someone clicks on the title of a blog post having found it under a tag (e.g. going to domain.com/blog/marketing and clicking on one of the posts) what URL is being displayed for the individual post?

e.g. is it domain.com/blog/seo/great-post-1 or is it domain.com/blog/great-post-1 ?

What really matters for duplicate content and canonicalization is whether the URL for the individual blog post is unique.

If the blog post has one unique URL, no matter how you get to it, and if the tags pages are displaying excerpts, then the only place you should be using rel=canonical is on the blog post itself. I think putting rel=canonical on a tags page that's only displaying titles and excerpts is asking for trouble. I don't like the idea of the search engines potentially thinking that your tag page, which has partials of many posts, is the original source.

If you're displaying full blog posts on the tags pages, then the solution is probably to switch it to excerpts and canonicalize only the individual blog posts.

Reference the SEOmoz blog: The SEOmoz.org/blog page doesn't use rel=canonical, and only displays excerpts, while seomoz.org/blog/post-title uses rel=canonical and displays the full post.