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To quote John Mueller, "The goal should not be to have a natural looking link profile, the goal should be to have a natural link profile".

Purchasing links would be inadvisable and against webmaster guidelines. Some of the best link building strategies I've seen have revolved around creating really great content and sharing and promoting it through social networks. Passive link building through content marketing is honestly the best way to create positive link equity without running afoul of Penguin.

Your client is a small business owner whose concern is in bringing in quality leads that are going to turn into customers. The strategy your superior wants you to follow is in line with your client's business objectives of bringing in leads with a local SEO strategy. At the end of the day, whether or not you bring in leads from organic sources is what your client is going to judge your performance on.

Whether your superior is technically right or not doesn't truly matter here. What matters is your client, and he's counting on you and your team to grow his business with a competitive local SEO strategy. Be a team player, and focus on the strategies that will bring him quality leads.

I've seen it advised that you should not use letters - so 1-800-eat-cows would be less optimal than 1-800-328-2697. I don't know if it's true from an SEO standpoint, but it's certainly true from a usability perspective. Customers do not enjoy having to translate letters into numbers, especially anyone who is even slightly visually impaired. Takes forever.

There are two good reasons to avoid the structure you've proposed: user experience and SEO. As your website gets larger, having more and more and more links from the homepage to each individual article is going to be a massive navigation headache, and will be confusing to users. If you're planning on orphaning that content so it's not accessible from the homepage, then again, you're creating a confusing navigational structure that will not be beneficial to users or to you from an SEO perspective.

The subdirectories are providing a no-nonsense approach to finding information quickly and efficiently in a manner that people are accustomed to. If the issue is that the subdirectories themselves are confusing, I would just rework the content so they make more sense and facilitate navigation.

There's also a loose rule about the number of links on a single page - try to stay below 100.

But if you have a small website and can organize the links in a manner that doesn't look like a hoarder designed it, then the structure you're proposing may be workable. I would just be very cautious about implementing a flat architecture like that for a medium - large site.

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!

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.

There is no hard and fast answer to this. I've seen a DMCA request with Google take over a year to respond to, and I've seen it take a couple of months. Treat it as a marathon instead of a sprint. If you're lucky you'll be one of the ones whose case is examined and quickly rectified but expect this to take awhile.

If your website isn't indexed, you'll want to try a few things first. Check your robots.txt file, make sure you haven't blocked bots. A lot of webmasters get it wrong when they set up that file by copying the file they used for their staging environment.

Next make sure you have a dynamic .xml sitemap and check to make sure it has been submitted to Google on google search console. These are the first two things you should check. If it's neither of those let me know and I'll provide some other methods of diagnosing the issue.

Adult websites get filtered from most queries. Google sets a high bar for these types of videos to show up in search in terms of how explicit a person has to be to find it, so don't be surprised if it takes some time to gain traction after you've managed to get the site indexed.

I'm a bit curious, it sounds like you haven't redirected the old site to the new one? If you have, have you performed a change of address in Google Search Console? And lastly, are there language differences between your .fr and .com sites? Have you set up your hreflang tags on one and not the other?

All else being equal, if you have two sites and one is optimized for a french audience via hreflang tags and a .fr domain, it would not shock me at all to see that Google is displaying one over the other on google.fr. Also consider that your french users could be clicking on the .fr site and boosting its ranking that way, causing Google to consider your old domain a more relevant source of information for your audience.

I very much doubt your competitor is affecting your ranking. If anyone could bowl sites on Google with that kind of cheap tactic they wouldn't have a working search engine in today's day and age. More likely your competitor is harming his own rankings.

Switching hosts will do nothing. Stick with GoDaddy and save yourself the trouble and expense.

I think Emily is on the right track here. You'll want to 301 redirect to pages that are similar in content. Your top level page on flowers from the old site should redirect to the top level page for flowers on the new site for example. It's more time consuming to implement one to one redirects this way rather than forwarding the entire domain to the homepage, but it will keep your referral traffic intact and Google is more likely to pass on the equity you've built over the years.

Hi Emily,

I wonder if there's a difference between the Windows and Apple version. I have not noticed it on my mac, but haven't paid close attention on my PC. What are you operating on?

I have a final update for everyone! We discovered the cause of the mysterious increase in crawling. One of our partners tested out a second version of the content on the website (yes, we have two complete sets of content for every page) by swapping out the first set with the second set. The second set caused Google to reevaluate the entire website, crawl it repeatedly thousands of times for two weeks, then stop.

The result of this refresh was a jump in the rankings. We were ranking on page one for about 15% of our targeted keywords and after the new content was inputted it jumped to 71%. Only time will tell if those new rankings will stick, but for now it looks pretty good.

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

Sorry Sean, I misunderstood your question. No, you cannot redirect any website you don't have access to. My recommendation would be to contact the host and work with them to obtain access. It's usually not a complex process.

There are several resources around the net that show how to do this. Here's a code snippet provided by http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/redirects/setting-up-a-301-permanent-redirect-via-htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.net/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

If this doesn't work for you, here are some other resources:
https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/301-redirects/
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/301-redirects/
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/how-to-properly-implement-a-301-redirect/

The first code example is more canonical friendly. The simple version I see used a lot and recommended in the other resources I've provided looks like this:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com

Definitely add more comprehensive content on product pages but make sure it's unique. Meaning if you use an API to bring in the manufacturer's specs and everyone else selling or renting your equipment are doing the same thing, then it's not unique and Google won't determine that you have something extra to provide to users. You should still have that content, but add on to it.

If you want an example of this technique working in the wild, just search any product and you'll find that Amazon ranks highly for thousands and thousands of products that others sell. They have a lot of unique content in the form of user generated content (which Google counts as unique content) and this helps them rank.

So yes, adding content will help you rank, but make it useful content (scrap the fluff), make sure it's unique content, and mark it up with schema for that extra oomph in the SERP.

Standard operating procedure for us is to nofollow anything we noindex. Theory is that pagerank will still flow through a link to another page that has been noindexed if you don't nofollow it. But since it has been noindexed the PR will just be trapped there and can't move on to another page through any links on that page.

I don't know how true that theory is, but erring on the side of caution has never cost me a dime, and nofollowing links to a page that is noindexed won't have a negative impact.

Unfortunately not, due to issues with data integrity and seasonal variations in traffic. What I can say is that it did not have a catastrophic impact on our traffic. Google still indexed both versions of the webpages if it found them, and chose to display one or the other. Since we don't have a constant to compare it with, it's difficult to ascertain the exact impact it's having. I can say that the less competitive terms with lower traffic we're ranking for just fine, but we're on page five for the most competitive term (with the most volume) we're attempting to rank for, and both an http and https page are vying for position. That's in part the structure being an issue, and also in part the content on the page is thinner than I'd like it to be.

If you run into this issue on specific pages, try adding a rel canonical tag to the page you want Google to rank. If you use this strategy only when you check your rank tracking tools to see which pages are in the SERP and having issues, you can cut down on the maintenance, and quickly determine whether or not it's the duplicate content that's preventing you from ranking or if you need to focus on other on-site or off-site signals.

Hi Jacob,

The definitive resource on reviews for Google is found here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/reviews

I'm not 100% certain I understand your problem. Are you worried about first party reviews wrapped in schema, or third party reviews? Are you able to see reviews in your Google My Business dashboard, or in a knowledge panel when you search your brand? Have you checked competitors who have been garnering reviews?

There are some industries that cannot display reviews due to legislation, such as financial advisors. I don't believe your industry falls into that category, and you may just be experiencing some normal fluctuation in the SERP. Verify the points I mentioned above and perhaps we can find an answer.

I'd be interested in seeing the research you did showing that Google is using Facebook comments as a ranking signal. I think a correlation definitely exists, and there is supporting evidence for it, but to date I don't believe anyone has proven causation.

The best research I've found on the topic is here: http://buzzsumo.com/blog/social-shares-and-inbound-links-insights-from-new-correlation-data/ In short, it states that some content that is shared garners more backlinks depending on the type of content and where it is shared. You should compare this with your research and see if it follows the trend noted here.

If you're trying to decide whether to move to AMP or not, consider that you could receive a ranking boost as some have, but you could also be sacrificing your ability to convert as highly as you used to.

I like to follow this rule of thumb: publishers yes, everyone else no. We all have to make money somehow and stripping out conversions is not a great way to do it.