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Hi Shamshuddin,

Like Dennis said, spam score shows how many of the 17 possible spam flags are triggered. These flags are triggered on link metrics or on-page metrics. Based on the amount of flags triggered Moz found  a correlation between those factors and the amount of websites that have been penalized.

Here is the correlation between the amount of triggered flags and the amount of penalized websites:

• 0 flags = 0,5% of found websites were penalized
• 1 flag = 1,0% of found websites were penalized
• 2 flags = 2,0% of found websites were penalized
• 3 flags = 4,2% of found websites were penalized
• 4 flags = 7,5% of found websites were penalized
• 5 flags = 11,4% of found websites were penalized
• 6 flags = 16,2% of found websites were penalized
• 7 flags = 30,6% of found websites were penalized
• 8 flags = 56,8% of found websites were penalized
• 9 flags = 71,9% of found websites were penalized
• 10 flags = 77,3% of found websites were penalized
• 11 flags = 87,3% of found websites were penalized
• 12 flags = 93,4% of found websites were penalized
• 13 flags = 98% of found websites were penalized
• 14 flags = 100% of found websites were penalized
• 15 flags = 100% of found websites were penalized
• 16 flags = 100% of found websites were penalized
• 17 flags = 100% of found websites were penalized

In your case there is no need to worry. If you wonder which spam flag you triggered you can check http://bit.ly/1P5WSeG and then click on any one of the graph icons  on the left of the domains in the results and you will see this: http://bit.ly/1GdbEyS 

I hope this helps!

PS. There is a whiteboard friday about this subject too: http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday

Hi Ravi,

In my opinion this question is way too general to give you any good advice. SEO is an ongoing process which include technical changes, content production and the promotion of your website. Within that scope no website is ever "done" or fully optimized.

I can advise you two things:

1. Start learning the SEO basics through the Moz beginners guide http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo so you can ask help on specific topics.
2. Hire a SEO company in your area so they can get to know your business, your ambitions and your current view on SEO. With this information they can give you some useful advice.

Oke, and one hint just to don’t make you leave with empty hands: you meta titles are way too long so they won’t get fully shown in the SERP’s. You can get a preview of how they will look like with the MOZ preview tool http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool.

Oh, and no use for meta keywords anymore!

Glad it was useful!

Hi Justin,

In that case I would ask your developer to make the sitemap on the website update automatically (or generate a new one every day). And submit that link to webmaster tools. If he's a real genius he could add your blog pages from Wordpress to this sitemap aswell but I'm not sure if Wordpress has a hook for this.

Alternative options:

1. Let him make the automatically updated sitemap for the custom part of the website and use this combined with the sitemap from the yoast plugin. You can upload both separated in Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure both got their own URL. In this case it’s all automated and is just as good as the previous method.
2. Keep on updating your sitemap manually. Just make sure you don't use the yoast sitemap and include the blogposts in your sitemap from screaming frog since this would give double input. If you choose to refresh your sitemap manually I would disable the sitemap within the Yoast plugin and use the Screaming frog sitemap which should include your blog pages aswell.

Good luck and let me know if this works for you!

Hi Lael,

Depending on your clients budget and needs I would go for a self-build website / CMS or a Wordpress website with a highly customized WooCommerce section.

Pros of Wordpress + WooCommerce

1. Fairly cheap compared to a self-build website.
2. Lots of extra functions that probably won’t get developed with a self-build website.
3. Easy to manage CMS system.
4. Very low design costs since you can buy a theme.

Cons of Wordpress + WooCommerce

1. Much harder to customize then a self-build website
2. You’re working from a basis (the template) and your adding more functionalities. You won’t get every tiny thing the way you like it.
3. The more plugins and customization you use the bigger the changes on conflicting plugins and security issues.
4. You are depending on updates from third party theme and plugins authors.

Pros of self-build

1. All the possibilities to customize the website just the way you like.

Cons of self-build

1. It will cost you client a lot since (almost) every CMS function, SEO tweak, color or margin will need to be programmed.
2. Locked in to the current provider since they are the one that knows how the website works. It’s a lot easier to switch provider with a Worpress website.

This list isn’t all there is to know. I recommend you take these steps to make a final decision:

1. Read some more about the pros and cons of Wordpress, WooCommerce and a self-build website (and other CMS systems).
2. Map out all the functionalities that are required for your client (including any SEO needs).
3. Check what functions you can find in Wordpress templates and plugins and divide your list in  functions that are offered by the Wordpress community and functions that aren’t.
4. Determine the investment in development with Wordpress and with a self-build website.
5. Compare costs with the earlier found pros and cons of both options and you should be able to make a decision.

Last quick tip: when you work with a subscription you will need a integration with your bank or any way to upload all the automatic payments of that week / month. Make sure you understand this process before you make an price offer to your client. In case this research takes a lot of time, try to explain your client your time investment and try to let them pay for it so you can give an accurate offer. If the job goes through you can give them any discount based on your research costs.

I hope this helps!

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the screenshots. Dirk's suggestion about screaming frog should be really helpful. This should give you an insight in the true 404 errors that a bot can encounter while crawling through your internal site structure.

Based on what I see I think your main problem is the manual updated sitemap. Whenever you change a page, add a new one or mix up some categories those changes won't apply to your sitemap. This creates a 404 error while those pages aren't linked to from your website and (without a sitemap) wouldn't give any 404 error messages in Google Webmaster Tools.

I saw you were using SEO by Yoast already, I suggest using their sitemap functionality. That should resolve the problem and save you work in the future since there is no need to manually update your sitemap again.

Let me know if this works!

Hi Justin,

Could you post a screenshot of the error message and any links pointing to this URL? This way we can identify what pages return a 404. If this are important pages on your website I would fix it right now, if it however are pages you don’t use or your visitors rarely see I would make sure you pick this up with the redesign. No point in fixing this now if things will change in the near future. Besides that, sitemaps help you get your website indexed, releasing this two weeks earlier won’t make a big difference for the number of indexed pages since you won’t change your internal link structure and website authority (both help you get more pages indexed).

About your last point, could you provide me with a screenshot of this as well? When I check zenory.com/sitemap.xml I find the .com sitemap, so that part seems fine.

_PS. I would suggest you change your update frequency in your sitemap. It now states monthly, it’s probably a good idea to set this much faster since there is a blog on your website as well. At the moment you are giving Google hints to only crawl your website a few times a month. Keep in mind that you can give different parts of your website a different change frequency. For example, I give pages with user generated content a much higher change frequency then pages we need to update manually. _

Hi Silvio,

In general I would say that you should focus on getting mentioned on places where you can find your target audience. Just looking at websites with high PA/DA scores won’t be the best fit for your business.

That said, if you buy any sponsored backlinks you should apply the nofollow tag or you risk a penalty. And since nofollow links don’t pass PageRank it won’t help your site ranking any better. It could however be a way to get some eyeballs which could result in earned backlinks. This is however heavily depending on where (relevance) you place a sponsored link and to what resource this link leads.

I hope this helps!

Hi Sumit Vyas,

To understand the new spam score I suggest you read:

http://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk

and

http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday

Moz checks a website on 17 points that they found are correlating to getting penalized by Google. A spam score of 5 tells you that 11,4% of website’s that do trigger 5 of any of those flags are penalized. The score doesn’t only take backlinks in account but does check on-page signals aswell. I would check the list in the blogpost any see which criteria you meet and consider start working on those. Note: correlation does not mean casualition. If you think it's legit, it porbably is.

Besides that, keep in mind that 88,6% of websites that do trigger 5 flags aren’t penalized!

Hope this helps.

Hi sdwellers,

Tools give you an insight in what might be the cause of ranking problems but they don't tell the whole story about a websites rankings. Algorithms are very complex and they do take in account a lot of different signals. A few signals that are very hard to take into account by any tool.

-       Dwell time (the time people spend on your site, and if they do or do not find the information needed)

-       The total backlink profile. Moz has its own index (PA/DA are based on this index) which only covers a fraction of all the links. A normal backlink audit would at least combine links from three different sources including the links from Google Webmaster Tools

-       Reviews about your business.

If you are serious about beating your competition I would dive deeper in SEO, or hire an expert. That said, I can give you a few tips based on my first impression of your website.

1. The black text (on the blue background) above and under your website are very toxic. This is a classic spam tactic which gets you discounted by Search Engines.
2. Your website isn’t mobile friendly (this will become an important ranking factor on 21 of April this year (next week). Google has been talking about this date for a while.
3. On first sign, I would say you could make your content more engaging. Your competitors website give a whole different feeling. I would take a good look at your design and the use of visual content. Scuba diving is all about a life time experience, keep people hooked to your site and you  dwell time (and sales) will go up.

I hope this helps! Good luck, and I would love to hear if you could make a difference the coming months.

_PS. Facebook likes aren’t used to rank website. Although a big social audience can help you get more backlinks which help a lot.  _

Hi Kayleigh,

Like Patrick said, just try to recrawl these pages. I assume that will fix the problem.

If that still gives the errors I would make sure to try it again with adjusted speed. Some servers automatically block crawlers (IP’s) that give a spike in there server requests. Screaming Frog can easily trigger this (happened to me aswell). You can set the speed under configuration.

If you give this a try I would go with one thread at a time and 0,5 URL’s a second. That worked for me. When it was a block it could be needed to get your IP address unblocked before you try it again. Good luck!

Hallo Linklater,

The short answer, internal site structure + domain autority.

For the long answer, could you provide me with an URL example? I tried to duplicate your setting but didn't find the pages you describe.

Hello Brad,

Just to get your question clear.

I'm I correct that you want a method that does let Google (and other search engines) know a portion of your pages are duplicates while you want both duplicated pages and original pages to rank in the SERP's?

If you could provide us with an example (link) that would help a great deal as well.

Great addition of Jonathan! I also think a well implemented example will not get affected by this update but identical pages won't do you much good in the future. So if you start with this strategy, make sure you do it good!

Hi OLLI_M,

I would definitely focus your homepage on the keywords / search intents for your primary keyword. This page is your best change of scoring in your own city and has the possiblility to score in city’s close by.

You don’t have to worry about scoring on your brand because:

1. When people search for your brand name they want you. So from an search engines perspective you’re the 100% match with this search intent and you will have a great dwell time and CTR which work in your favor.
2. You will probably get enough inbound links with your brand name in it. That’s very natural.

There are probably a lot more reasons why you will score on your own brand name but I hope these make it clear you don’t have to worry about it.

When you determine your website structure you will probably need some insights in the following:

1. Are people adding local modifiers like “Car service [city name]”
2. What is the search volume on those keywords? Based on this, are there any more city’s in your service area you intent to rank on besides the city you’re located?
3. What is the competition on the keywords you intent to rank on?

In a normal situation where you have one physical location and you serve a couple more nearby city’s I would advise you to focus your homepage on the city you’re based in and add level one pages for the city’s in your service area you intent to rank for. Make sure these pages are added to your normal navigation and are interesting for visitors who do either enter your website through your homepage as directly through the local landings pages.

Miriam wrote a great guide for creating those service area’s on Moz. You might want to check it out:  http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

You can also check out this project we have been working on some time ago: www.skaya.nl (Dutch website).

When you click on “Waar rijden wij” you will find a list of the city’s they give driving lessons. Every page has some unique tips and information about driving lessons in those specific city’s. In this case we also added the city we’re based in as a level one page. So either our homepage as the local landings page can score on the city were based in.

Two more great resources when you want to start local SEO I would love to share with you:

1. http://moz.com/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered
2. http://moz.com/blog/11-ways-local-businesses-can-get-links

I hope this helps!

PS. When you look at the example there are two improvements for this website. The tabbed content should be shown immediately and there should be less duplicated content like the prices for example. Just so you don’t copy the wrong parts of this tactic

Ryan, my final thanks to you for taking the time to respond! I got what I need to make my decisions.

Thanks a lot Miriam! This definitly helps!

It are day courses and we are the only one that does rents the place.

• If we want we could place a huge billboard outside

• It does have our company name on the door

• We are there around 3 days a week fulltime.

I would definitely say we have the authority to represent this building since it's just a normal office building we rent and we turned it into a classroom, a place to lunch and a small place to do some administration.

So yes, it are classes. But we aren't part of a larger facility and it's our permanent location.

Hello Miriam,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I learned a lot from your previous posts on Moz.

What’s your take on putting up two (or in the future 3 locations) in the footer?

I know it’s a best practice with one location but I’m not sure what will happen when we put two addresses in the footer (especially when we can only claim one local Google + page). We really want to communicate those locations to our clients since it’s really important information for anyone who takes our classes.

Besides that, how would you combine for example 3 pages about the physical locations with unique pages for a other 10 city’s that are in the service area of your business.

Normally I would add those service area pages to the main navigation, but would it make sense to use the same format for service area’s as for places with a physical location? With format I mean the combination of information and unique content based on the interests of those local searchers.

Last but not least, would you say a part time entrepreneur with a physical location that’s only open for 3-4 days a week could claim a local google + page?

I ask this because I want to know the borderline. Since our second location really feels like.. uhmm a legit physical location. We are there every week, are the only business that does rent this place (we pay for the whole month), serve our customers there and we communicate the address very frequently (that’s really needed since there are a few competitors located in the same area). So the only reason why it shouldn’t be a local Google + page is because we are not open the full 5 days a week (besides the phone number which can easily be fixed and I already did recommend to the client since the branding/trust benefits are already enough to switch).

It feels like the Google guidelines are written specific for classic retail companies. In our (niche) industry there are maybe one or two competitors who are open 5 days a week since classes are only given with enough signups.

I hope you can share your view on this case!