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Well, it sounds like you'll need to find it or create it.
First, you could offer up your own reviews. You could also open up the pages to allow comments. Go ahead and push those heavily on your social networks to pull in traffic to gather up those reviews.
Agreed, go with subdomains or dedicated pages, depending on the amount of content you have per location. With a franchise, you're ultimately trying to rank the brand so keeping all that content on one root domain certainly has its advantages.
For local SEO, set up separate social pages that point back to your location pages (or subdomains) on your main site.
If it makes sense, offer up a feed of content from your local social sites on your local site pages so it stays nice and fresh too.
It's hard to quantify the impact of the 404 pages not knowing the relative size of your site.
Overall, the 404s aren't good for your SEO. You should work towards fixing the pages that are giving the error or 301 redirecting the bad urls.
I ran into this situation a few years ago. We set up inner pages with the modal content anyway and loaded the content via ajax. For users without javascript it would gracefully degrade. Who doesn't have javascript right? Well, Google crawlers for one. The additional pages won't hurt you. You can craft this so it's a transparent process for the end-user.
If you're in a competitive market and you only have the single page it will be extremely difficult to compete with other sites that are pushing new content and consistently expanding their web presence.
If you have the content to do it, go for it! Depending on your market you may find some long-tail opportunities when doing your keyword research.
As for the Services page itself, you'll have lots of relevant, summarized content; so shoot for your top-level keywords here. "dental services in <city>", "dentist in <city>", etc.</city></city>
Hey Karen-
Links on Facebook are marked rel="nofollow" so no link juice is actually passed from them back to your site.
Hope that helps!
John
Google doesn't follow javascript so if you want the links followed on that page you'll need to somehow include them in your code.
I agree with Adam. 301 redirect the .net to your .com so you keep your link juice on your main site.
Many people use the .net versions as a safeguard to prevent competitors from using the namespace in the SERPs, especially on competitive keywords.
Go the distance and request the link update - it's just cleaner that way!
Have you considered treating the .com as US-only and setting up a .co.uk as UK-only? The domain setup seems US-centric when it's handled in this way.
When you ask if Google will only rank one of them... are you saying you don't want the UK version to rank?
By separating the domains you'll take them out of the competing space and have each one rank in their respective countries.
Hey Joel-
Check out this article on moz; look for section #2.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/answers-to-the-seo-professionals-litmus-test
Rand suggests a meta refresh with 0 delay when you have no htaccess:
If that doesn't work or you have lots of URLs to deal with, you may want to consider another hosting provider that offers you more bang for the buck!
Hope that helps!
John
I think this is where we'll see the relevancy of content playing an even more important role. It will provide more opportunities for higher rankings - with KG applied, you'll be fighting against others in your category instead of the broader multiple-meaning terms.
Check out this previous post right here on moz:
Ahhh, you will definitely run into duplicate content issues!
You want to include a rel="canonical" to point to the domain & path without the variables. You don't want this sort of URL to be indexed (use robots: noindex,follow); it's much better to show the clean URL in Google.
Your best bet is to "noindex,follow" your tag pages. There was a great article about this just a few days ago on the Moz blog:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success
The article covers tags, categories, author pages and more. You're sure to find what you're looking for.
-John
If you're talking about links on a page, 100 - 200 is the general guideline depending on your site.
If you're talking about incoming links, and they are quality links, then let 'em rip! Seriously, for incoming links you primarily want to just stay ahead of your competition. The general idea is to slowly build them over time, think of them as a natural linking progression rather than - BOOM - all at once.
Hi Neil-
How are you handling your canonical tags? You'll want your regular domain to rank, not the mobile domain. Be sure to include rel="canonical" on your mobile pages to point to the main domain.
John
