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The simplest solution would be to mark every page in your test environment "noindex". This is normally standard operating procedure anyway because most people don't want customers stumbling across the wrong URL in search by mistake and seeing a buggy page that isn't supposed to be "live" for customers.

Updating your robots.txt file would tell Google not to crawl the page, but if they've already crawled it and added it to their index it just means that they will retain the last crawled version of the page and will not crawl it in the future. You have to direct Google to "noindex" the pages. It will take some time as Google refreshes the crawl of each page, but eventually you'll see those errors drop off as Google removes those pages from their index. If I were consulting a client I would tell them to make the change and check back in two or three months.

Hope this helps!

I think you should consider how your users are interacting with your website and how they search for your services/products/locations and follow that. For example, Yelp is focused on local reviews. People will filter first to their city, then the category naturally. You would never filter down to restaurants first, because if you're in Huntington Beach, CA you really don't care what's in Portland, OR. If location is secondary to your product, then it makes sense to start with the category. For example, let's say you sell ATVs and other off-road vehicles and gear, but some showrooms only have ATVs while others also carry dirt bikes. Customers who are looking for a dirt bike care more about reaching a showroom with dirt bikes, so that category structure would be preferable.

Note that I'm assuming in both of the above examples that your navigation is following the structure of your website for usability purposes. In terms of structure, one way is not inherently better than the other from a ranking/algorithm perspective, but if your structure is confusing it can be detrimental to SEO. For example, outreach is a lot harder if you have a garbage navigation that contributes to poor user experience on your website. Any piece of Google's algorithm that measures user satisfaction with your website (Rank Brain, pogo sticking, etc.) will either directly or indirectly affect you depending on how user friendly your website is.

One last thing: in both instances you have the geography in the URL, so if you're hoping for a boost for local phrases from an exact match URL I think you're already tapping that. EMDs are nowhere near as effective as they were in years past, so I wouldn't make that my focus.

Easy way to "buy" backlinks, in style, without running afoul of webmaster guidelines.

Step 1: curate a list of all the sites you want a backlink from
Step 2: get the emails of the webmasters there - lots of tools and methods for this, both automated and manual
Step 3: use customer match on Google or Custom Audiences on Facebook to upload your email list of webmasters you picked
Step 4: use targeted ads to get your content in front of this audience

This really only works if you don't have garbage content. But basically you advertise this content only to people who actually have a website and would consider linking to you and voila. You've basically "bought" backlinks.

If by structural reason you mean SEO then I can't foresee the structure you've proposed giving you an advantage in the SERP because you're diluting pagerank from the homepage. Let me explain:

Our fictional site example.com has five subdirectories that it links to from the homepage. Your homepage has a certain amount of pagerank - for simplicity's sake let's say it's 100 units. That gets divided out to each of those pages it links to. So example.com/shoes now has 20 pagerank. And each of the pages your subdirectory links to gets pagerank from /shoes. So let's say you have 10 pages under that subdirectory so example.com/shoes/heels has 2 units of pagerank.

With your new structure, you have 50 links from the homepage instead of the 5 you had before, and your 100 units will be divided by 50, meaning those interior pages (example.com/shoes/heels) are still getting 2 pagerank, but your top level pages are gone so you lose any ranking ability they had.

To the best of our knowledge, pagerank still works like this, though Google has acknowledged that its been fine tuned over the years, and I'm still not sure how they account for sites like Pinterest that use infinite scroll. But if you're competing for national terms like "shoe sales" then backlinks and the ranking power they provide are going to matter for you.

Regardless of all this, I still advocate what's best for the user experience because ultimately if this change you're making will improve their experience, you'll be linked to more often, engagement will improve, they'll convert more often, and your business will grow. Whereas if this improvement boosts your rankings but you lose conversions then you've failed to align your SEO goals with your business goals.

I hope this is helpful - discussions about technical structure is difficult when you don't have a visual. If I'm missing the mark, link some examples from another website that's similar to what you're trying to do.

I see Google focusing on mobile more and more. The launch of Pixel was specifically done to maintain search share (people rarely change default browsers on mobile devices, which Microsoft used to their advantage in Europe by releasing phones preloaded with Bing).

That said, mobile friendliness will be ever more important. This means the mobile first index will be fine tuned, and I expect to see more ad revenue focused on mobile this year. Site speed will continue to play a factor, and further integration of video into the SERP and paid ads is where I'll put my money.

HTTPS is already a ranking factor, but I expect that to become more important in the future once a certain threshold is crossed. Once Google can force the issue without impacting their own search quality I'm sure it will happen. Unknown if that will be a 2017 advancement or further down the line.

And of course Google will continue to try and make G+ relevant

Hello Raymond, I'll answer you second question first because the explanation is a bit lengthier.

There has been a lot of debate over the years about how accurate the information in Search Console is, particularly some of the information in Search Analytics. Personally, I found the information to be inaccurate at worst and misleading at best. As an example, I searched through the number of impressions one of my client's small local sites had received over a period of thirty days and discovered my client was ranking for some long tail keywords that were misspelled and had somehow received hundreds of impressions from those keywords. I then checked the volume of those keywords in Adwords and saw immediately that there was a discrepancy between what Adwords reported (an extremely low yearly volume) and Search Console (extremely high monthly impressions).

So either A) impressions means what we traditionally know it to mean - someone typed in a keyword and landed in the SERP and saw the listing. Which would mean the information is inaccurate (possibly tracking bot traffic?). Or B) impressions means something else entirely in Search Console, which means it's misleading.

This was a roundabout way of saying don't take Search Console data as gospel. There isn't a clear cut guide on how the information is gathered and disseminated, meaning you cannot quality check it for accuracy the way you can with Google Analytics.

To answer your first question: adding a secondary keyword that's relevant is unlikely to negatively impact you. I would find it highly suspect that Google would rank you lower for adding MORE content to your website, and the additional keyword could improve CTR, which has been associated with higher rankings for awhile now, as a sort of positive signal with a short half-life. Just make sure it makes sense for your users and the topics are related. "Tree removal and tree trimming" is acceptable, whereas "Tree removal and ice cream" would be confusing and I would be unsurprised to see a negative impact from that.

Howdy folks, I'm using advanced search operators to generate lists of long tail queries related to my niche and I'd like to take the batch of URLs I've gathered and upload them in a batch so I can see what the PA is for each URL. This would help me determine which long tail query is receiving the most love and links and help inform my content strategy moving forward.

But I can't seem to find a way to do this. I went to check out the Moz API but it's a little confusing. It says there's a free version, but then it looks like it's actually not free, then I try to use it and it says I've gone over my limit even though I haven't used it yet.

Anyone that can help me with this, I'd really appreciate it. If you're familiar with SEMRush, they have a batch analysis tool that works well, but I ideally want to upload these URLs to Moz because it's better for this kind of research. Thanks!

Yes, Google can penalize you for hiring bloggers. They view this is a link scheme (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356) and it's something that SEOs have been doing for a long time. Google has gotten better and better at catching these types of schemes, so it would not surprise me in the least if you were caught up by Penguin, which now operates in real time and simply devalues links instead of putting your entire domain into a sandbox.

To keep your strategy in line with Google's webmaster guidelines, you should request that those links be marked "nofollow". There is still a lot of value to this kind of outreach even with a "nofollow" added, so I wouldn't recommend you necessarily stop doing what you're doing as the bloggers have been honestly informing their audience that an editorial review was requested.

Some of the ways nofollow links can still help you:
1. quality referral traffic
2. backlinks generating backlinks over time

Best of luck, let me know if you have additional questions. Thanks!

There is value. You are indicating to Google throughout your website with every link you place that you consider Page A or Page B to be more or less valuable than the other to your users.

We know that Google places different values on backlinks based on the the placement of the link. For example a link that is in the main body content will pass along pagerank and so will a link in a footer, but the value is modified as it passes through on the assumption that a link in the footer is of different value than a link placed in content.

I'm not sure where you heard that Google only counts the first link it finds. That's incorrect, and you can read any of the older articles from Matt Cutt's blog on how pagerank works to see why.

I believe the best case for you is to create links that go to content you value highly for your business and your users, and to place these links in logical places.

This is a tricky question to answer because you're asking about the overall strategy and tactics for running a successful PPC campaign and integrating that with your SEO strategy. I'll share with you some personal results and tactics we've used, and some learnings, and hopefully that will help answer your question.

First, some context. We do a lot of SEM and SEO for local services, so I'll be using HVAC as my go to reference point.

1. Brand keywords are super cheap for us. We've always found this to be a good investment as it doesn't normally cost much and if we don't buy those keywords, some of our competitors do.

2. Buying other brands - just as you want to keep competition out of your space, you can invade theirs. Also hasn't every cost us very much money in the past. Much lower conversion rate from these, but every one you snag is a customer won.

3. CPC varies greatly. Especially for local keywords. Different regions have different competition levels it seems. I've seen some guys with a total Cost per Lead of $45. I've also seen it skyrocket to over $100 CPL in a different region.

4. Don't confuse SEO and SEM. There's a big difference. SEM/PPC is referring to paid ads, SEO is the organic listings. They are two separate disciplines that require two separate skill sets, so you shouldn't have any SEOs trying to sell you SEM unless their agency does both.

5. Bid for profitability, not revenue, and you can keep your costs down so you're bringing in leads at an acceptable cost. As long as you've set up a tracking and attribution model that works you shouldn't have any problems making adjustments until your campaign is running smoothly. You can axe the keywords that are costing too much and improve the ones that are bringing solid leads.

Hope that helps. I do recommend doing SEM on top of your SEO. If you're having trouble running a profitable campaign, find an expert you trust and commit a stable budget for a year and see what they can do.

The best course of action is going to vary. Generally I'd say promote your content everywhere you can until you find what works. Maybe the content you're producing is best on Instagram, or maybe it gains more traction on Pinterest. Maybe your tweets have more engagement than your Facebook posts. Should videos go on Snapchat or YouTube?

It's really difficult to say what you should be doing without any knowledge of your products, services, content, brand voice, etc. If you're considering paid promotions then Facebook is probably your best platform for its ability to target very specific segments. And it just has massive reach. But otherwise, try to match up your content with the right platform through discovery.

Once you've got that nailed down, definitely give the content a home on your website. This gives people something to link back to.

You can get pretty creative with how you target people for link building campaigns, so you don't need to take this strategy as link gospel, but it's one option for you that I think is a bit more ethical and probably more effective in the long run than paying bloggers individually to link to you.

Google does not use social signals as a ranking signal. It would be far too easy to manipulate rankings, and there's no guarantee of quality.

However, studies have shown a correlation between content that is shared many times and links garnered. You've likely gained quality backlinks thanks to all the repinning on Pinterest, and that has impacted your SEO efforts in a positive manner. And of course, quality referral traffic is always appreciated

Hey there, we do this **A LOT **at my agency (I'm currently managing three enterprise local SEO clients) so I think I can help you.

1. Your citations are composed of your NAP+W information, so the best situation is to make sure that it's as unique as possible between the two separate locations. 
   a. Name - this will probably be the same unless your client has a naming convention like "FroYo Blast San Diego" and "FroYo Blast Sacramento". 
   b. Address - this will be unique
   c. Phone - This **can be **unique and should be. I know some clients send everything through a call center and that's suboptimal. 
   d. Website - create location specific landing pages and link to those. 
If you follow this then the only non-unique item in there is potentially the name. What we've found across something like 350 websites/locations is that the more unique this information is, the better rankings tend to be.

2. For local SEO we've never needed to actively build links outside of citations and we rank page 1, often position 1, for highly competitive queries. Relevant content is more important, so make link building a lower priority. You may need to work on backlinks if you are in a very competitive space, but small local businesses generally have a hard time getting backlinks, which is probably one reason why it's not as important a signal. If it were, then the only HVAC businesses showing up in search would be the ones paying SEOs for link building services which I think Google realized.

3. Put the locations into your footer and wrap those in schema. You could do the header too I suppose, but from user testing we've found it's better to keep the header area decluttered. Start putting in too many phone numbers up top and people get confused.

4. We build a unique website for each location. When you can't do that your best bet is to build landing pages that optimize for the location. On one of our programs we have about 1500 of those landing pages, and we rank on page 1 for a little over half of our 18,000+ targeted keywords with that strategy. It's harder if you're not physically in that location, but since you have a physical location that makes it easier. Make sure you're mentioning the target location in your meta data, like title and h1 tags where appropriate. That helps!

Best of luck!

I like the blog kissmetrics did on this awhile back: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-started-using-schema/

From the article:
"Schema markup helps your website rank better for all kinds of content types. There is data markup for…

• Articles
• Local businesses
• Restaurants
• TV episodes and ratings
• Book Reviews
• Movies
• Software Applications
• Events
• Products"

What I really enjoy about schema is that it's virtually untapped. Every time I do a SERP analysis it amazes me how few of my client's competitors have optimized with schema. If you're willing to read through the resources on schema.org you'll see there are tons of ways you can markup your data. We've implemented roughly 9 types of schema for one client, including local business, product, offer, and reviews (not sure where the full list is). The neat thing is that you can also mark up specific elements on the page, such as videos or open hours.

Another plus to taking the time to slog through it - it's a common language across all search engines.

Best of luck!

This can create some real headaches. If you're going to secure a part of the site, you may as well secure the whole thing. Leaving part of the site unsecured and just securing a few pages that are transactional or used to collect customer data like physical addresses is something other sites have done, but should be considered a temporary solution while securing the rest of the site.

While I'm not sure that this implementation would create dark traffic in your Google Analytics reports, you're still leaving yourself open to MIM attacks and other SEO issues with a partial implementation, such as creating duplicate content. I'm dealing with this issue right now with a couple clients and I can share one of the headaches we're experiencing.

Mixed sitemap URLs! Some URLs are in https and others are in http, because they've managed to confuse the CMS (don't ask, I'm not sure what they did yet). On top of that, duplicate content is created with every new page, because the CMS now creates a page in http and a page in https. The dynamic XML sitemap then picks one and adds it. It gets worse, but I'll end it there.

You can avoid all this by securing everything, and you'll have the optional benefit of upgrading the site to HTTP/2 if you secure the whole thing first.

Anyone attacked by a scraper can agree that Google isn't foolproof. We have one website that has turned invisible even though it was ranking strongly for years. The scraper copied everything exactly with one exception - they changed all the links on the site so nothing would point back to ours. It was a pretty nasty hit. Still waiting on the DMCA takedown.

Let's start with some easy things to fix shall we?

First, thin content. I crawled your site with Screaming Frog and found you have 482 internal pages on your site. That's a good size! But 80 of those pages have less than 300 words, and a some of them have as few as 18. My french is a little rusty, but most of those pages that have a low word count look like contact pages. So while not entirely necessary for the user experience, it can't hurt to add some text that's easily readable by users and bots in HTML. At the very least, provide a call to action that represents your brand so people are more likely to fill out your form. This should help reduce or remove your "thin content" warning.

The "No Contact Info" warning is easily fixed. Add social links to your footer and an email address where users can contact you on your contact page.

Ignore the "Low number of pages found" warning for the time being. You should check this against Google Search Console to see if Google is finding all the pages you've listed in your sitemap. If Google says they've found everything and indexed it, you're probably pretty safe. When I crawled it with Screaming Frog, I found that all the pages returned either 200 or 301 status codes, so this may just be something wonky with the Moz Crawler. You can also check how Googlebot sees your website with a tool such as httpstatus.io by setting the user agent to Googlebot.

A couple other notes:
1. You did a great job specifying the language for your english pages, but you can add hreflang tags to your French pages. 
2. You have both https and http pages being generated. Make sure you're only creating pages in https. This is complex and beyond anything I can easily describe in a response here, so you'll have to work on this with your web developer. Once you have everything in https, go ahead and enable HTTP/2 for your website. It will improve security and speed.
3. Finally, check you link profile with a tool like OSE. If you're being linked to from shady websites with suspicious anchor text you'll want to disavow those links. Anything from Russia check to make sure they're not scraping your site. I've been getting a lot of that junk with my clients.

That was a what I got from a quick browse. I think you will reduce your spam score sufficiently by following the steps listed above as well as improve your site's security, speed, and user experience. Good luck!

The first thing I would do is focus on answering the questions people have. You can do this by typing in a product category (like motorcycles) at http://answerthepublic.com/. Based on a white paper released by STAT there are several types of questions that populate featured snippets at a faster rate, so I would focus on answering the what, why, and how questions first, and answer those questions in either

Sounds like you're going to have some serious CMS limitations but hopefully this helps you add content in a meaningful way to your client's website.

Wow, this is a loaded question. The way I see it we can break this up into two parts.

First, subdomains vs. domains vs. subpages. There has been a lot of discussion surrounding which structure should be used for SEO friendliness and to keep it really simple, if you're concerned about SEO then using a subpage structure is going to be the most beneficial. If you create a separate domain, that will be duplicate content and it does impact rankings. Subdomains are a little more complex, and I don't recommend them for SEO. In some cases, Google views subdomains as spam (think of all the PBNs created with blogspot.com) and in other cases it's viewed as a separate website. By structuring something as a subdomain you're indicating that the content is different enough from the main content of the root domain that you don't feel it should be included together. An example of this being used in the wild appropriately might be different language versions of a website, which especially makes sense in countries where the TLD doesn't represent multiple languages (like Switzerland - they have four national languages).

Next, the concept of duplicate content is different depending on whether it's duplicate internally, or duplicate externally. It's common for websites to have a certain amount of duplicate or common content within their own website. The number that has been repeated for years as a "safe" threshold is 30%, which is a stat that Matt Cutts threw out there before he retired. I use siteliner.com to discover how much common content has been replicated internally. Externally, if you have the same content as another website, this can pretty dramatically impact your rankings. Google does a decent job of assigning content to the correct website (who had it first, etc.) but they have a long way to go.

If you could assimilate the new content and have the pages redirected on a 1:1 basis to the new location then it's probably safe enough to do, and hopefully you will have it structured in a way that makes it useful to users. If you can't perform the redirect, I think you're more likely to struggle with achieving SEO goals for those new pages. In that case, take the time to set realistic expectations and track something like user engagement between new and old content so you have a realistic understanding of your success and challenges.

Instead of trying to group pages by keyword, try thinking about searcher intent and task accomplishment. Can you write one comprehensive page that addresses the searcher's needs and includes all the keywords? Or does it make more sense to break into a couple different areas, such as a page that's specific to a plaintiff and a page specific to a defendant?

Try this: create a venn diagram of the different audiences that may visit that section of the site you're contemplating building out, and group the keywords that you suspect each audience would use and see where the overlap is. If there are areas that are completely blank, you don't need a page for that specific audience or task. Doing this will help you determine which pages need to cover which keywords for the right audience. For example, for an optometrist there's probably searches involving "contacts", "glasses", and "lasik". You might be able to address all three on the same page, but that's probably a horrible experience for someone who is just looking for a specific eyeglass style to have long text about the benefits of lasik. Very little overlap there because the audiences and intent may be different, so they get different pages, and that shows up in the venn diagram.

Hope this helps!