Are you still seeing a 7-pack? From what I've seen, the latest Pigeon update has removed almost all local 7-packs for a more compact, 3-pack or the new "local stack" (or whatever we're calling it). When I Google "toronto dentist," I'm getting a more compact 3-pack, granted I am in the States.

To answer your original question, I'd probably say no just because it's probably not the best way to focus your local SEO efforts. In most cases the local packs are at the top of SERPs (underneath ads, of course) but very rarely are they half-way down the SERP. I have some clients targeting keywords with SERPs that trigger the local pack between organic listings 1 and 2, but that's becoming rare.

Your goal should be to rank in the local pack (or higher in it, if you're already there). What I can say is the way to possibly jumping the local pack and the way to move up in the pack are likely the same tactics: basic local SEO. There are a ton of blog posts out there from awesome experts like Andrew Shotland and Mike Blumenthal, but some important initial questions to ask yourself and audit your website with:

• Basic SEO principles: duplicate content (all forms), good title tags, img tags, etc.
• Local SEO principles: business city/state in title tags, NAP on (basically) every page, local phone number used (not 1-800), etc.
• Technical principles: all the basics, 404s, bad 301s/302s, XML sitemap, using schema for local business (or more specific schema [there's now a dentist one, I believe], etc.)

If you're a multiple location business there's a whole lot more to the Local SEO principles, but I'd recommend checking out some of the experts' and their blogs for those. Some of those recommendations and answers can be too long for a Moz Q&A.

Given they were

tags and not something more powerful like an

, I'm not sure how detrimental it would've been, however, I think your SEO agency is right to change the HTML element to something else.

How the

tags were being used was outside their initial design (page hierarchy and design), as davebuts pointed out above.

While I'm just going off of your description, you shouldn't need rel="next" and rel="prev" pointing from one category page to another. However, if you're talking about one category that has multiple pages of blog posts, for instance, then yes, I'd definitely recommend adding those tags to help search engines understand the relationship between that pagination. Just make sure they're implemented in the .

Here's Google's webmaster central blog post on the matter: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html. I'd read, memorize, and then bookmark.

Again, I'm not totally sure what you mean by the description of the image gallery. However, if there are multiple pages of images (pagination) within the gallery, then yes, add the rel="next" and "prev" tags there, as well. If there are lots of images, your best bet might be creating a "View All" page you could combine that as the canonical URL along with your rel="next" and "prev." That may be excessive given your website though.

I don't think you need the link element tags pointing from one image to another, that's not really how the rel="next"/"prev" elements were meant to work. But that should get you jump started with your understanding! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Yes, I'd also put the canonical tag on Page A referencing the Page A URL.

In general, self-referencing canonical tags are a good thing to implement site-wide. Then, when you do need to make a change and have one duplicate page's canonical tag point to another URL (in this case, Page B to Page A), the tag is already in place and you can make the change more easily.

But if self-referencing tags are in place from the beginning, they can also help squash lots of other duplicate content problems that end up occurring on more complex websites.

Hope that makes sense!

Without having any additional context, my best guess would be one (or likely more) of your competitors have targeted these keywords with standard local SEO tactics: hyper-localized, local address/business schema markup, address and other local neighborhood information, relevant on-site content, etc.

Maybe they've focused more on semantic aspects of on-page SEO factors (co-citation, location of targeted keywords in relationship to one another, other semantic relationships) than you have? While it sounds like you've done a good job including your website (a backlink) in high-quality local directories (more than your competitor[s] have at least), but what about links overall?

While local-relevant links are nice, high-quality links in general will still carry a website a long way as far as ranking and consistent organic traffic. It appears Pigeon - the most recent local update - is steering closer to generic web ranking signals, not just the local stuff.

Hope that helps! Would be happy to try and provide more information if you're able or willing to answer some of these questions.

If you had any type of duplicate content penalty - or other Panda related "slap" - it would effect the entire domain's rankings, not just the one subfolder where the duplicate content problems existed. I've never heard of an algorithmic penalty that only effected one area of a website… it almost always slaps the entire domain.

Ah, ok. My mistake, I didn't drill down enough. One thing I did notice: you have authorship markup on those product pages as well. That should be removed.

According to Google's guidelines, for product pages that are not specifically written/constructed by an "author," that markup should not be there. Rel="publisher" is the only necessary markup for non-blog or article content.

The schema markup you've implemented looks good in the page source, and checks out as being correctly implemented (without any duplicates) using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool (found in Google Webmaster Tools). It appears the data highlighter markup is not causing duplicates.

I'd recommend double-checking all the product pages you've added schema to that you originally had from the data highlighter markup. There may be duplicates, there may not. To be honest, I've always gone right to schema.org, but checking for duplicates should be the only thing you should have to worry about.

Good luck!

In general, redirects dilute the link "juice" - or authority - a page has accrued from links and other search-related metrics. When you redirect that page to another, all of the authority does not flow to the new page. A portion of that page's link value/authority does flow to the new page. The majority is lost.

However, in your case, it sounds like there are many other things affecting your website's performance in SERPs. I'd expect your duplicate issues - even if recently resolved - to hold your website back for a time longer, but if all those other issues clear, yes, the redirect could be the main reason for the effected ranking.

Where have you added schema markup? What pages?

After briefly scanning a few pages on your site, I'm not seeing any code from schema.org in the page source. Has this been implemented/gone live yet?

It depends on what you mean by "remove."

If the content of all those old blogs truly is poor, I'd strongly consider going through 1 by 1 and seeing how you can re-write, expand upon, and improve the overall blog post. Can you tackle the subject from another angle? Are there images, videos, or even visual assets you can add to the post to make it more intriguing and sharable?

Then, you can seek out some credible places to strategically place your blog content for additional exposure and maybe even a link. Be careful here, however. I'm not talking about forum and comment spam, but there may be some active communities that are open to unique and valuable content. Do your research first.

When going through each post 1 by 1, you'll undoubtedly find blog posts that are simply "too far gone" or not relevant enough to keep. Essentially, it wouldn't even be worth your time to re-write them. In this case, find another page on your website that's MOST SIMILAR to the blog post. This may be in topic, but also could be an author's page, another blog post that is valuable, a contact page, etc. Then perform 301 redirects of the crap blog posts to those pages.

Not only are you salvaging any little value those blog posts may have had, but you're also preventing crawl and index issues by telling the search engine bots where that content is now (assuming it was indexed in the first place).

This is an incredibly long content process and should take you months. Especially if there's a lot of content that's good enough to be re-written, expanded upon, and added to. However making that content relevant and useful is the best thing you can do. It's a long process, but if your best content writers need a project, this would be it.

To recap: **1) **Go through each blog post 1 by 1, determine what's good enough to edit, what's "too far gone." 2) Re-write, edit, add to (content and images/videos) and re-promote them socially and to appropriate audiences and communities. 3) For the posts that were "too far gone," 301 redirect them to the most relevant posts and pages that are remaining "live."

Again, I can say firsthand that this is a LONG process. I've done it for a client in the past. However, the return was well worth the work. And by doing it this way and not just deleting posts, you're preventing yourself a lot of crawl/index headaches with the search engines.

The TLD element is definitely a strong point.

Something else to consider: have you investigated the website's backlink profile? Especially given the industry, I wouldn't doubt there was some manipulative link practices going on with the anchor text "lead generation" from spammy sites.

Just a thought.

Inserting the brand name again in the product page portion of the URL is unnecessary and looks like a keyword stuffing technique. Assuming the brand you're representing gets a lot of search traffic, focusing on the power of your domain should be more than enough to attract visits to your site.

Focusing on users should be your main focus when designing URL structures. As a potential customer, repeating the brand name in the URL of pages would be unnecessary and unattractive. Thus, it will (probably) have the same effect on search engines. As Adam said, short and user-friendly is the way to go.

You can't - and more importantly don't need to - submit a reconsideration request if you haven't received a manual action message in Webmaster Tools.

Sounds like you're on the right track if you've used the Disavow Tool. Hopefully you personally reached out to all the webmasters linking to you before using the tool? If not, using the Disavow may not be as effective. Make sure you've purged ALL the links that may draw suspicion. Personally, I'd rather disavow a link that's "good" if I have any questions about it instead of leaving a link that's "bad" in the backlink profile.

In order to begin to recover from the algorithmic penalty, I'd recommend you begin creating a white-hat link building campaign based around unique and valuable pieces of content. Good content that's relevant and important to your target customer with attract links naturally (over time).

Glad it helped!

Ruben,

I'd agree with your assessment that those URL formats are too long and unnecessary. This URL structure looks a lot like keyword stuffing and EMD (exact-match domain) as well as PMD (partial-match domain) were valued by the people who made the website. In their defense, depending on how old the website is, those extra keywords may have actually helped the pages rank better for relevant queries years ago.

I wouldn't worry too much about redirecting those URLs or changing them today, however. I suppose you could but today search engines are far more sophisticated. I don't think it'd be a great investment of your time.

Moving a subdomain permanently can be a huge project! This question is probably better answered through a blog post that includes a walkthrough of what to check - and double check - before finalizing anything. Below are some of the blog posts I've found that best detail this process. If you come across any questions, feel free to reach out! I'd be happy to help. But I'm sure the blog posts will do the trick (including one here at Moz!)

• How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website with Redirects

• A Quick Guide to Redirects for SEO

• How to Help Avoid SEO Pitfalls with 301 Redirects

Good luck!

That story sounds a lot like an algorithmic penalty and not a manual one. I've heard of people receiving manual action messages as a mistake or with a similar story to yours, maybe a Google slip-up?

I'd take a good, hard look at your website from a neutral perspective. Take your bias out of it, regardless if you think you're a company that's only ever done white-hat SEO techniques. Are pages "really" meant for users? Is there information you could probably remove that's "unnecessary" or "duplicate"?

If you have to, hire someone to do this in a consultant role. It'd probably pay off in the long run. Good luck!

I'd take a strong look at where those conversations are taking place. If the forum is spammy - or has been in the past - a simple mention and link of your business (even if it's being done legitimately) will raise a red flag. It also may say something bigger about your link profile as a whole. Are all your links coming from similar sources (i.e. forums)?

As far as removal, you could try and contact the person directly through the forum (if possible). It may require you signing up for that forum. You could also try and use the disavow tool as a last ditch effort. Not sure how successful that would be, however.

My ultimate suggestion? Diversify your backlink profile.

Hmmm, not really sure what you're talking about. Can you expand on the problem?