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100 locations? Are you a franchise or a large brand?  When I see this type of question the first thing that comes to mind is to be very mindful of the guidelines. Not saying you are doing this, but you cannot use employee homes for listings or virtual offices. Ok, so assumptions aside. If you are truly in the guidelines legally and location wise then BrandA” vs. “BrandA” - Brooklyn Office is the way to go, adding a city descriptor is against the guideline unless that is how you represent your business in the real world. You can use labels to differentiate them in the dashboard. But really, read the guidelines closely, you could end up ina very bad place, Guidelines for representing your business on Google Hope that helps

The content owner is something separate, where you register the content as unique and original. Theoretically, that way you would have the "right" to determine where the content can get posted/shared or not, and you will have the right to remove the video if other people share it, and even let it there and get the ad revenue that is generated from the said video. You can learn more about content ID here. Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting https://dalerioconsulting.com/ info@dalerioconsulting.com

Hi Ben, You're welcome! Good follow-up question. If your company (XYZ) places patients in facilities you don't own (Sunshine), then you aren't authorized to create GMB listings for Sunshine. Nor would any other service that places patients in those facilities. Sunshine would need to market themselves as the owner of that location. Hope that makes sense.

Hey Ben!  Dave here from the Help Team, Its hard to say what could be going on with these links without being able to look at your website.  Would you be able to write into help@moz.com with this info so we can take a deeper look? thanks!

Yes I would recommend moving to https over  the curent http it will be very unlikely that you have an issue with google and  The end-users will feel much more secure. If you are doing this on a bespoke site ( not very common CMS or made by hand) I know tools like  letsencrypt.com give you a free certificate so will CloudFlare.com  so if you're trying to have HTTP/2 , HSTS, forced https & a cert you can use for free version and it will do everything you need for https cost  (free-$5,000) (any reverse proxy CDN or WAF) stackpath.com ($20)  incapsula.com ($59) sucuri.net WAF ($19) Armor.com ($600-7,000) WAF only (under $200) Speedyrails.com has always had deals on cloudflare (35-40% off) if you're going to use it. if you use a EV cert or just want to have a regular certificate I strongly recommend looking at third-party sites you can save a lot of money. I like  DigiCert and GlobalSign  personal most of the others are on the Symantec what was VERISIGN you can definitely get away with getting one for $5-100 on namecheap  but remember to search for the best price on Google. They tend to make the job a lot easier and  my personal opinion is that every person should actually do have WAF for their sites they like.

Hello Kris, Thank you very much for your help. We’ll contact the host to see if they could help. Is there any way to check if it’s the CMS and database structure or is that also something for the hosting company? Also, we checked and there was an issue with the sitemap.xml. Could that have been a potential cause? - More just curious. Please let us know if there are details we could provide that might help. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks again. Best,

Hey Ben, I'd definitely set up a project in MOZ Local and SEMrush and I'd periodicaly measure the amount of backlinks and keywords which you are ranking for in comparison to your competitor. Backlinks and KW rankings are the two KPIs I would measure in this case. Also, if they are ranking for some KW which you are not, you will see it in the SEO tools and you can start working on it to outrank them. Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

Hello George, Thank you for your response and help! It seems like doing both is the way to go (assuming no duplicate content, GSC and Moz are being monitored). I did have a couple quick follow-ups just so I’m clear what you meant and you don’t mind: When you mentioned “…keeping things on the primary domain would be a better idea over time if …” – Did you mean that if it’s part of a regional strategy we probably shouldn’t do both and just stick to the sub-folders? I know that there’s tons of advantages to just using the sub-folder (especially from a resources/authority/link perspective) but assuming we need the separate domain I just wanted to be sure of you meant. Also, if the regional site should naturally win out for a local search but we would want to use ‘second’ domain for local searches would it be best to not do both approaches? – I imagine it would depend on the value being sent from the priority site vs. ability to rank on its own but though I’d ask. Please let me know if I could provide any further updates that could help. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks again! Best,

It seems odd to deal with filtering here. I'd normally do that in Search Console under URL parameters but you have to be extremely careful altering stuff in there. If you email me the site I'll run a check on why Collections aren't showing.

Hi Ben, Another good question. I want to preface what I'm saying here by saying I'm not an expert in linkbuilding and that I see what you're asking about as having some grey area. I'll do my best to describe what I'm talking about. In an organic SEO scenario with virtual businesses, I agree with Rand's explanation in this WB Friday https://moz.com/blog/backlinks-maximize-benefits-avoid-problems-whiteboard-friday. Please, watch the video and pay special attention to his explanation of linking from mysite.com to myothersite.com, where he's describing cross linking between two domains you control. So, his explanation is good on this and very educational and well-thought-out. Now, once you've watched that, we need to consider that your business scenario is not virtual - it's local, and you're having to take all of these extra steps to make sure your two websites don't get mixed up with one another in Google's "mind". Again, if you were able to get the client to consolidate, then you and I would be recommending a super internal linking strategy because that would be purely internal and would not look like the business is trying to manipulate anything. But, in the multi-site local business scenario, we're dealing with 3 possible outcomes from cross linking: It could potentially look to Google like the business is trying to artificially elevate the authority of that second site, though Rand's advice could help lessen the chances of that. You're taking all these steps to separate website A from website B (ensuring there is no shared NAP or shared content) to avoid citation confusion, but now, you could potentially be undoing all of that by overtly associating the two sites back together by crosslinking between them. If there's no matching NAP between the two sites, citations may not suffer and duplicate listings are unlikely to result, but you are definitely letting Google know that both sites are related. And, even if you think you're being pretty mild in your cross linking, it's important to know that there have been cases in which the industry has speculated that Google was applying the Possum filter in the local rankings based on a parent company controlling the two entities. See the #2 case in Joy' Hawkin's article about Possum: http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900\. I mention this not because you'd be going after local rankings for the two entities (you're only pursuing then for the main business), but simply to illustrate that Google may well understand that the same business is controlling both websites based on something like the same parent company being listed on two business licenses. Google can dive pretty deep, it seems. Point of all of the above: there really may be little way to hide from Google that a single business owns both entities, so basing the SEO strategy of either on crosslinking between the two may not be that smart. To me, personally, it's a strategy that seems kind of manipulative at face value, and while I've described nuances that could make a gentle approach not too big of a deal, I'd be leery of making it into a "strategy", per se, for the business. That second website, if it must exist, needs to be good enough to earn links on its own and to be a candidate for selective external linkbuilding efforts. If it has to lean heavily on the main site, it's just another argument for why the multi-site approach isn't really recommended. Whew! Long answer, but this is a complex topic. Hopefully you can read up further on this topic to form your own opinion and help the business make a sound decision.

Hi Ben, When you say that your client uses Duck Duck Go to check rankings, do you mean they manually check rankings in that search engine? Or they have some sort of tracking through Duck Duck Go? It almost sounds like there needs to be a conversation to educate the client on search engine market share and why they should be more interested in tracking rankings from Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, something that a Moz Campaign can do on both a national and local level. Apologies if I misunderstood the question, happy to help further if that is the case. Best, Joe

No problem at all. The legal implications certainly make it more complicated! Unfortunately the only suggestion I could really offer here is to block out a time where you can get through them all at once or withing a day or two max. The longer they're down, the greater the chance you'll drop in rankings and not see an easy recovery. It may even be worth doing them in batches of 10 - 20 posts and re-publishing them as you finish each batch. At least this way you're steadily minimising the number of pages that are offline rather than taking the all or nothing approach.

We are having the same issue on our site, this this ever got resolved?

Standard operating procedure for us is to nofollow anything we noindex. Theory is that pagerank will still flow through a link to another page that has been noindexed if you don't nofollow it. But since it has been noindexed the PR will just be trapped there and can't move on to another page through any links on that page. I don't know how true that theory is, but erring on the side of caution has never cost me a dime, and nofollowing links to a page that is noindexed won't have a negative impact.

Thank you Bernadette for that response and help. That’s what I thought would be the solution. Am I correct in assuming that because the http version is currently being indexed that there would most likely be an associated temporary drop in results while Google sorts everything out? – Because they are a seasonal-heavy business I’m trying to plan this accordingly so any experience/insight would be appreciated. Thanks again.

Hi Ben, Mike Roberts answered it very well and explained the reasons that you should buy comments and wait for organic users to comment on your post/pages. Let me add some more pointers to the same answer with my own perspective. A very well written comment can add  a lot of value to a page / post if it compliments the content and intent of the page/post it would be highly beneficial for a new visitor for getting another user's perspective / feedback about the website. Now, coming back to the original question whether buying comments can do that job. The answer most of the time is , very hard, NO. The reason is very simple, the commenters are not actual users of your website or your services and they might not even understand the reason your website is there, so their generic comments can look artificial to other users. As for SEO, I don't think google analytics analysis whether the comment was made by a person who spent 30 secs or 30 mins on the website, for Google Search and SEO the content of the comment and it's relevancy to the content on the page is more important. This purpose also gets defeated by a generic comment , it would look more like a spam to search engines than a good contribution from a natural site user. I hope this helps, if you have further question, please feel free to respond. Regards, Vijay