Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No problem, if you have any other questions about getting YouTube videos to rank let me know! I would love to help.

I agree 100% with both Donna and vcj!

If you have the opportunity to get the backlink, I would take it. The more links you have to your site (from reputable sources) will demonstrate to Google that you have an influential/informative website. As long as the page that is linking to you is relevant, there is no harm from getting the link.

Keep up the great work getting those links!

Hi Chris!

I know how you must be feeling—trying to take on a competitor that is ranking very well can be daunting. But believe me, it can be done!

Here are some suggestions to get your company ranking on page one AND outranking the competition:

• Local SEO - I know you know how information this is, but don't push this to the back burner. Get your local citations as tight and consistent as they can possibly be.
• Content - This is an obvious one, but continue creating new and unique content for your website! Make sure you are generating content that is helpful for users and proves that you are THE authority in the area. The more direct your responses, the more likely you are to rank—and maybe even land a Google direct answers spot!
• Videos - Google likes to display a wide variety of media in its search results—including videos. A video is 60 percent more likely to get ranked in a search result than a landing page on the same topic.
• Images - Optimizing the images on your site can help you get on the first page of Google when it displays image results.
• Microsites - A microsite (sometimes called a minisite) is a website used to supplement a company or organization’s primary domain. More often than not, the microsite will have a URL distinct of the primary domain and has its own unique design and navigation. Microsites can help you target different buyer personas, appear more relevant and authoritative, as well as get multiple listings in organic search results.
• News - Putting press releases out for your business can potentially score you a spot in the News section of Google, particularly for branded terms.

We wrote a blog about getting your business on the first page of Google, so be sure to read that for more in depth information than I shared above!

Let me know if you have any other questions—hope this helped!

Hi! Like Tawny said, without looking at the crawl report or knowing the URL you were crawling it can be hard to determine exactly where this URL came from.

If you want to share the URL info I would be more than happy to help you determine the root of the problem. This is definitely something you should look at thoroughly though in case your website has been hacked.

Thanks!

Hi Completebanker! For a better and more direct response go here: https://moz.com/help/contact/account.

Hope this helps!

You should always 301 redirect if you change a URL in any way! However, be aware that redirects do affect your SEO ranking, so if you're able to leave a URL as it is on a page with decent traffic, it's typically suggested that you do so.

I hope this helps!

I've been hearing this question more and more often as of late. Here's the basic information on Title Tag construction, as provided by Moz: https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

Moz suggests: Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name. Moz also mentions that since Google only displays the first 50 or so characters of your title tag, it's imperative to get your keyword in those first 50 characters so users are able to see them in the search results when the title tag is displayed.

In fact, if you scroll down on the page, you'll see that Moz specifically suggests placing important keywords close to the front of the title tag, citing: "According to Moz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking—and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results."

I hope this is helpful!

Great question!

Based on the situation you've described, your best bet is to direct all of the geotargeted pages to canonical to the version on that sub-domain. So, for the example you provided, .

I would not rely on geo-targeting to have the right links show in the right search locations!

It sounds like your competitors may be taking advantage of spammy link-building practices! You can use the Moz Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/)  to compare your SEO client's off-site authority to their competitors' off-site authority. This tool will give you insights into the domain authority, page authority, how many total inbound links the site has from how many domains, as well as page social metrics.

This tool is extremely helpful when you're concerned about boosting equity-passing links, as it gives you an insider look at where your competitors are being linked from, so you can learn whether they're being linked from valid sources or spammy ones (Open Site Explorer shows you the spam score of each site that links to you).

Hope this helps!

Hi SEO Team @ G5!

Since you are unable to create one large domain that houses all of the locations, I would attempt to make each of the websites as "unique" as possible. But keep in mind that unique content doesn't necessarily mean that you need to completely reword the content in different ways 250 times. Small changes can make a big difference.

There's a great (and short) video of Google's Matt Cutts talks about how Google handles duplicate content. There's also another helpful video about it here.

Matt Cutts has said, "Google looks for duplicate content and where we can find it, we often try to group it all together and treat it as of it’s just one piece of content. So most of the time, suppose we’re starting to return a set of search results and we’ve got two pages that are actually kind of identical. Typically we would say, “OK, rather than show both of those pages since they’re duplicates, let’s just show one of those pages and we’ll crowd the other result out,” and then if you get to the bottom of the search results and you really want to do an exhaustive search, you can change the filtering so that you can say, “OK, I want to see every single page” and then you’d see that other page. But for the most part, duplicate content isn’t really treated as spam. It’s just treated as something we need to cluster appropriately and we need to make sure that it ranks correctly, but duplicate content does happen."

Read more from this article here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2319706/googles-matt-cutts-a-little-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-your-rankings

With this in mind, I do think your assumption is correct. If you make sure that any location that could be seen as competing areas has unique content, they won't necessarily be dinged for duplicated content. Unless you were trying to rank nationally, this shouldn't be a major problem for each individual website that is targeting a different location.

Hi Richard!

We work with a lot of home service (HVAC, pest control, landscaping) companies and from our experience we've found that (like Tymen mentioned) dropdowns are ok as long as you don't make them keep dropping out further and further. It also depends on the amount of services you are trying to fit in the navigation.

Majority of our clients' websites' top level navigation would have - About | Landscape Maintenance | Landscape Design/Build | Portfolio | Contact - or something about those lines. Under "Landscape Maintenance" we might include Lawn Mowing, Irrigation Services, etc., in the drop down, but instead of continuing to add to the drop down, we would only link the top priority services from the drop down and list additional services with internal links from the main Landscape Maintenance page.

On our HVAC clients we might have "Heating" listed at the top most link in the navigation that has a drop down to Furnaces and Heat Pumps, and then we would include another drop down that includes links to the Installation, Maintenance, and Repair pages for both these services. I would only recommend doing double drop downs if your navigation doesn't include many services. For instance, if you have a bunch of services listed under Heating that ALL have an additional drop down, it could negatively impact user experience.

We try to pair down the main navigation to be as simple, but helpful/effective as possible, and include links to additional (less prominent) services from other landing pages instead of trying to jam pack everything in the top level navigation.

I hope this helps you figure out how to pair down the services!

Hi Alastair,

Moz has a great blog post that discusses how many links is too many. I would check that out for advice—while there isn't an exact number of links you should not exceed, many people suggest having fewer than 100 links per page.

Something I would be worried about is link juice. When your website receives a backlink from another website, hopefully with a high domain authority (YAY!), the link juice is being spread out to ALL the pages being linked from the page they are linking to.

This means if www.cnn.com (who has a domain authority of 96) links to your company's homepage, they would be spreading some of their authority to you through "link juice". But instead of retaining majority of that juice/authority on the homepage (thus increasing the authority on that page), you are going to be spreading fewer and fewer amounts of that authority through all 120+ pages linked from the homepage.

Check out this link juice diagram to get a visual representation of what I am talking about.

Hope this helps!

Hi Brett,

Your confusion is understandable. "Button" and "buttons," for example, are so closely related that it seems strange that Google would identify those as two separate keywords. However, it is important to remember that Google search results aren't always based on a semantic understanding of the search, and Google can't always assume that a word modified with an s on the end always means the same thing as a word without an s on the end. Take the words "cosmetic" and "cosmetics," for example. So it has to treat plural and singular versions of a word as two separate keywords that rank differently based on competition for those keywords.

Here is an article that offers an opinion on how you should handle trying to rank for both the singular and plural form of a word - you may find it useful: http://www.business2community.com/seo/singular-plural-keywords-always-seo-0974028#DJv4kwHCfdUFBPG2.97

Hope this helped!

This is a great opportunity to test some of your ideas. It may be a good idea to create unique landing pages based on the most highly search keyword per region and target them on the corresponding geo-page. Read more about great ways to rank geo-targeted pages--and make them convert: https://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-friday

However, it may be agood idea to optimize the homepage, about page, and service description pages for the products rather than the locations.And, since you're a national brand, it may be smart to try so PPC ads to geo-target your advertising and use those keywords accordingly.

Check out this support page from Google: https://support.google.com/business/answer/6187665

No matter what, duplicated locations for multiple accounts are a violation of Google My Business' quality guidelines. Simply put, this can negatively affect how you show up in search results. SO. You can choose to put that address on ONE of the accounts.

As for whether or not merging your accounts would be worth it, it may be best to speak with a professional at Google. They can hear the uniqueness of your situation and help you choose the best route for both pages. The contact page is a little tricky to find, so here's the link: https://support.google.com/business/contact/business_c2c_m?rd=2

Hope this helps!

Good luck studying! Here are some other beginner's SEO guides to check out:

• https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
• http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo
• http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Hope this helps!

Hi Swendt,

For more information check out these two blog posts that talk about SEO for Bing and SEO for Bing vs. Google, but I can give you the TL;DR version here.

While Google and Bing care about pretty much about the same ranking signals, the websites weigh these factors a lot differently. For example, while both search engines care about backlinking, Google cares more about the number of backlinks while Bing places a lot of emphasis on the authority of the backlinks—think TLD (.gov, edu and .org) backlinks. Additionally, it helps to keep in mind that Bing’s search algorithm is less complex than Google’s search algorithm. This is important because it makes Bing more susceptible to spam, which Bing completely understands and attempts to counter. For example, Bing weighs domain age more heavily than Google does because domain age demonstrates credibility in a search engine’s eyes.

A few more tips to optimize your website for Bing:

• Bing likes keywords in the domain, but Bing also likes short URLs
• Bing likes TLD extensions (especially .gov, .edu, and .org)
• With Bing, link diversity matters more than on Google (this may have changed post-penguin)
• Sites that use precise anchor text tend tend to rank higher on Bing – especially when your anchor text matches the page title
• According to Search Engine Journal, Bing tends to favor sites with a lot of content
• Older domains tend to do better on Bing
• Bing prefers a site structure that goes from broad (think homepage) to specific (think product-specific landing page)
• On Bing, the authority of your backlinks matters more than the number of backlinks you have
• Bing practices social searching and cares about things like Facebook “likes”

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have anymore questions.

Hi Silvia,

I don't personally have experience with Tradenames.com but from what I've read in a few forums (upon searching "tradenames.com reviews" into Google) I see that people have mixed reviews about them.

According to ScamAdvisor.com the website is 86% safe so if this something you think your client would like to invest in, it should be ok. But I would read through a few forums (i.e. the ones that Thomas provided below) and learn about the different experiences people have had working with them in the past. That is going to be the best way for you to determine if they have a good or bad reputation online.

Hope this helped!

Hi Ricky!

I have to agree with Andy. If Google realizes that these two websites are promoting the same company with similar information on each site, your client could go from seeing both their websites on Page One to not at all.

I understand why you would prefer to keep both sites without damaging their SEO efforts—doing so would help you maximize your online real estate. But in fear of being dinged by a Google algorithm update I would go through with the process you listed above that gets rid of the one site and put all the necessary redirects in place. There are plenty of other ways to maximize your listings on the SERPs (i.e. YouTube, online directories, etc.) that don't run the risk of hurting your SEO results.

Hope this helps—good luck!

Hi Joey,

Like Gaston said, when a new page is created will get a PA=1. Since these are newer pages, the page authority of 1 is nothing to be worried about just yet.

The reason your blog posts have much less authority than your homepage, for example, is because it is likely that there are multiple websites linking to your homepage. It is much more difficult to get backlinks to your blog posts as you continue to generate website content. If you are looking to improve these, I would try to get links back to the blog posts from high authority websites. You could also try guest blogging on a website with a high domain authority that includes a link back to a related blog post. You want to guest blog on websites that are:

• Relevant to your business – either because they focus on your geographic area or industry (or both)
• Authoritative (quality sites with quality human-edited content)
• Popular (frequently read by your target customers)

Hope this help! We have a blog post that talks about building links on blog posts, so check that out if you're looking for more information. Good luck on increasing the page authority on your blogs.