Hi Jochen,

It's an interesting situation and to be honest, I don't know for sure how search engines will deal with that "link juice". This will come down to a question of whether search engines see robots.txt or htaccess first. If it looks at robots first (which is my suspicion), it can't see that page to pass the strength.

I suppose to test this, you could submit the redirected page to index via Search Console and see if it shows you the redirect or says it's blocked.

Interesting question aside, there's no real need to block access to a 301'd page

Also, apologies if I'm just highlighting the obvious here but it would be far better to clean up the site structure and remove that duplication rather than just masking it with robots; the user experience is at least as important as the algorithms!

Along the same lines, cleaning up those pages is going to help your crawl budget immensely.

There are a lot of elements to consider when doing an eCommerce SEO campaign and both schema and your page titles/meta descriptions form just small parts of it.

Are you currently researching how to SEO the site or are you at a point where the majority of work is done and you're looking to refine schema/meta info?

It's always hard to say for certain without inspecting to the two domains but it may be that your client is optimised for that one city while the other site is more broad and suggests they have or regularly deal with multiple locations.

Local SEO won't inherently hurt your national search results but if you only have a single location and the entire site seems to focus around that and surrounding suburbs, it would make little sense for search engines to rank you for locations in other areas, especially other states.

Even if the client is limited to a single office, there are plenty of ways to spread their digital presence and begin pushing them up for other locations.

I was going to describe in more detail until I remembered that Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on this topic about 12 months ago that does a better job of explaining it than I could in a comment. Hope that helps!

This isn't something I can offer a solid answer for since it's not something I've ever looked into but I don't see why they would be any different. As you mentioned, subdomains are treated as a separate domain so in your example, Site1.blogspot.com and Site1.com are seen as having the same relationship to each other as any random domain.

Having links from a bunch of sites on the same IP isn't ideal as you also pointed out though as with most things in SEO as long as you don't go overboard it won't be a problem. If a fair portion of your link profile is made up of these or you pick up a bunch of them in a small period of time it's also going to look a little more dodgy.

To be honest though, this is kind of the wrong question to be asking anyway. Link building should be about building relationships with other companies and bringing in qualified referral traffic and by extension, more business. If you're doing this, you won't have to worry about these other metrics because a genuinely good and relevant site will already be sending all the right signals.

It isn't possible to do this when behind a login but I would definitely still spend the time doing what you can manually before pushing it live.

The other option you have is to push it "live" but block the whole site from crawlers with Robots.txt. Screaming Frog does give you the option to ignore the instructions in Robots so you could still crawl it. If this site is replacing an existing one that makes it a little more tricky. If that's the case, you could still do this but make sure that you get to work on your audit the second you push it live and get it done as quickly as possible.

If the site is up and blocked via Robots for 20 minutes it's unlikely to cause an issue. If you leave it that way for a week however... not such a good idea

No problem at all. To be honest, it's really not a huge deal and probably not worth the dev budget or manhours required.

In most cases with a site like this, I'd be more inclined to add good alt text for all images on the most popular pages then, as you're working through other pages throughout the life of the campaign, update the alt text while you're at it.

If you're already updating the page title or content on a page, it's not that much extra effort to do the alt text while you're there.

Generally you'll want to hide your staging site from search engines and as Malika mentioned, the best way to do this is via robots.txt.

That lets you essentially set a rule stating that no crawlers are to access anything on that domain. Beyond that, nothing else is really relevant; if crawlers can't see your site, it doesn't matter what you do with it! You don't even need to worry about 301 redirects once this is done.

Once you apply that change in robots.txt, you may still see your staging site indexed for a little while (anywhere from hours to a couple of months) but this is normal and it will drop away soon enough.

Search engines are pretty good at determining which is the real site these days anyway!

Hi Gayane,

It really comes down to a question of budget. Having a site for each location will allow you to be the most geo-targeted but if you have 5 different locations, that essentially means 5 SEO budgets. 5 lots of content (all having to be completely unique), 5x the link profiles and 5x the monitoring, planning and general campaign management.

In reality, the best option for most of us is to use a single site for all areas. Since Google looks at a lot of domain-wide metrics these days, it means if you're boosting content and links to your Las Vegas page, your LA page is going to benefit from that to an extent as well.

Rather than go into detail with ideas on how to do it, check out Rand's Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

I hope that helps!

Assuming pricing in your country (US?) is about the same as here in Aus, I'd probably do the following if I didn't have SEO knowledge myself.

• Use a few months worth of that budget upfront to get a quality company to do a thorough audit and devise a plan for me to work through
• Work through this plan as quickly as I humanly could without cutting corners
• Return to the original company periodically (quarterly?) for advice along the way so I know I'm always on track and not wasting my effort sprinting in the wrong direction
• Buy a few helpful tools to make analysis easier and monitor results. I'd say at least Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 items) and some kind of ranking tool - we use AWR Cloud.
• Engage a contractor of some form (Fiverr?) to start producing as much quality content as the remaining budget allows

Of course, if services are much like tangible products where Australia is 50-100% more expensive (the joys) then I'd probably just take the time to find and engage a quality agency and keep a close eye on their work to make sure you're getting value. Here in Aus the value you'll get from $1,000 /month is questionable unless you're in a vertical with minimal competition.

Before the hate starts - _some _agencies and certainly freelancers can do a fantastic job for you on that budget, it's simply that the smaller your budget, the higher the likelihood of landing a dud provider. Again, $1k /month in the US may be the standard minimum for quality agencies so this wouldn't apply.

No problem at all. As you said, the fact that you can do a site: search and see that your pages are actually indexed means that most importantly, your site is in Google's index.

As for it not showing up in Search Console, it's very hard to troubleshoot these ones without access to the account - after 3 or 4 weeks you really should be seeing at least some data in there. To my knowledge, the only part that really lags a whole lot is the number of indexed pages.

You should be able to see Content Keywords for example. If all data is completely blank, there may be a larger problem here. Can you see Analytics data for this domain? If so, was Search Console verified via Analytics?

Hi Umair,

There are a few changes I'd suggest here if this was one of our clients. There is no real clarity around the most recent Google updates but there has been talk of onsite elements taking more of a focus either now or in the near future.

Either way, here are my suggestions from a quick glance of the site:

Keyword Focus - The page title for the home page is keyword-stuffed but the page itself doesn't seem to have a focus. The other pages lack a focus as well. Through the page titles, headings and content there doesn't appear to be any particular focus term(s)

Thin Content - Most landing pages seem to have ~100 - 400 words. We consistently see the best results from 1500+ words per landing page, though even boosting them to closer to 1000 words should see an improvement. Just make sure the content is legitimately valuable to the user, not just a sales pitch about your company.

**Site Speed **- GTmetrix gives a page speed score of E. Site speed is quite important these days

Excessive URLs - Some of the URLs are quite excessive. This appears to be done to fit keywords in but this can be done in a cleaner, more succinct way. For example, rather than _www.midigital.co/about-mi-digital-agency-marketing-services/, _either about-us or digital-agency would be perfectly acceptable and still on point.

Footer Links - The use of sitewide footer links on a few sites isn't ideal. The worst example having well over 30,000 links from the one domain

Blog or Comment Spam - Most of your anchor text profile is made up of variations of "louis vuitton sunglasses" terms. While I haven't dug down to confirm this, it does at least raise a red flag for me and search engines.

I hope that helps!

I would expect to. I can't say I've ever come across this question but we know Google doesn't really care if our headings are wrapped in a

tag these days, they just look at the styling so I would suppose this would be the same, just in reverse.

That said, it's kind of an awkward thing to do

This thought process is heading down a path I recommend against, so my initial response still stands. What you're talking about doing here is essentially just SERP manipulation rather than providing a good website that ranks because it deserves to.

Your idea will probably work if done correctly, the trouble is that doing it correctly takes as much (if not more) effort than quality tactics that are above board.

The biggest issue I see is that to have each of these sites and content pieces ranking of their own accord, you need search engines to see them as different entities. To rank for your own branded terms in their respective locations, you also need search engines to understand that each of these sites is your brand. Basically, you need to show that the sites are both different and the same brand simultaneously.

Making them appear separate will take the same black hat stuff as running a PBN these days - host them on different servers, have the registration info either obscured or different on each site, don't inter-link between them etc. Your aim is to make them all appear to be different sites, owned and run by different people.

As for having the content unique enough to actually appear unique, having the same person write multiple versions of the same article isn't going to go very well unless they're well trained in doing this stuff. The writer is going to use similar sentence structures and phrasing no matter how much effort they put into it and this combined with the same branding and identical topic are probably more than enough flags to highlight what you're doing.

If you want it to work, do as much as you can to make them look completely different, including different writers. Just plan it out beforehand and consider the time investment here and whether or not that time could be used more effectively.

Assuming you've only got one instance like this, search engines are typically smart enough these days to see this is an anomaly rather than a pattern of intentional spam.

It wouldn't be the worst idea to disavow them I suppose but if it were my site, I wouldn't worry about it. On the other hand, if you have a number of instances where this is happening, I'd look to address that quite quickly.

Google understands that weird things like this can happen to all of us and they can't be judging everyone by the individual links or perceived actions. As a perfect example of this, my latest client has never done any form of digital marketing. Looking at their backlink profile they have 7 quality, natural backlinks and 2 Polish spam/scraper sites in their backlink profile. They can't help having their site scraped, just like you can't control the structure of that site you have 45k links from

Great tips Bryan! The only thing I'd add to this is to be realistic about your sales funnel expectations and how you structure your site.

Almost nobody is going to spend 10 - 20 minutes submitting personal information (or even generic information for that matter) on their first visit. Tailor your landing pages toward new clients without completely neglecting the returning ones. Capture at least an email address from those interested new users then use a combination of quality content, social presence and email marketing to build that familiarity and rapport to a point where they're comfortable in giving you their personal info and they see the benefit behind it.

You can't just tell someone your product or service is good and expect them to believe it, you have to provide an environment where they can arrive at this conclusion by themselves.

A good example of this being Moz vs a small SEO website. You're far more likely to spend 20 minutes completing a survey and providing contact info for Moz than you are a small firm you've never heard of because they do this stuff very well.

Hi Maurice,

To answer this one accurately, we'll need a little more info on what happened. What was changed on your site as a result of the hacking? Were you hit with a manual penalty or is it just algorithmic? What have you done about fixing it so far?

With that info I can be a little more helpful

For some broader advice though, do everything you can to restore your site to its original state and if it has been a manual penalty, definitely provide a detailed account of what happened and what you're doing to fix it via Search Console. If it's just algorithmic, fixing your site and continuing to improve it is going to be your best way to fix it.

Regarding the pages that have been taken down, just make sure Screaming Frog or a similar tool isn't picking up any 404s from them - if it sees no 404s it means there are no remaining internal links to those pages. That being the case, the only 404s will be from external sites which aren't your responsibility. Once this is done, Google will realise fairly quickly (hours to a couple of weeks) that they're actually gone and de-index them.

Whether or not this is an issue kind of depends on what your product or service is. If you provide a local-only service like a restaurant then your US site ranking in the UK would be unusual.

On the other hand, if you sell a physical product this may not be so unusual. For example, here in Australia we're quite limited when it comes to finding men's online clothing stores, most of it comes from the US or the UK so it's not uncommon to see something like the US Jackthreads show up in the SERPs here.

Since you do have separate domains for each location, this might be an indication that search engines aren't really understanding the different jurisdictions for each site; maybe they're not geo-targeted enough for the algorithm to comprehend the fact that each of the 3 sites server a unique area.

Some of the elements that can help define this, in no particular order:

• Server location
• HTML language ( e.g. lang="en-US")
• Regional language differences (e.g. US spelling vs UK)
• Location markup - on your location pages at the very least
• Location mentions throughout your content

While not specifically on-topic, Rand's Whiteboard Friday about scaling geo-targeting offers plenty of great advice that can be applied here as well.

Moz's Spam Score is about far more than just questionable backlinks. Since we don't have a URL to dig deeper and offer specific suggestions, the best I can really off you is a couple of links to better understand what it is you're looking for - it will probably spark a few ideas for you.

Link 1 - Whiteboard Friday

Link 2 - Moz Blog

As far as using tools like OSE and Majestic goes, Chris Hickman is correct in that they're imperfect. OSE seems to have the smallest index (ie the lowest volume of sites crawled) while Majestic has the most so it's only natural that Majestic would be giving you higher numbers.

Hopefully this will at least point you in the right direction!

Gaston has already answered your question well so I won't go into that any further. What I will say though is don't forget to consider the user intent here - depending on what your product actually is, people using that niche word may be looking for something different.

To use your cars vs automobiles example in a research context, you might find for example that people searching for "history of cars" are searching for recent history, whereas users searching for "history of automobiles" may be looking for info dating right back to the very first automobile.

Perhaps a poor example of my point but hopefully this illustrates what I'm getting at. While the two may technically be the same, sometimes we use variations of a word with a different intent. Your keyword focus should always be around this intent rather than just the words themselves.

I hope that makes sense!

Hi Jacob,

The answer really just depends on why the pages exist in the first place. If they're not serving a legitimate purpose then absolutely delete them.

If they are legit pages that you'd like to rank (e.g. individual product pages on an ecommerce site) then maybe take a look at why they don't rank in the first place. Load speed? Site/nav structure? Internal linking? Blocked in robots.txt? Not in the sitemap? Maybe no unique content? There could be plenty of reasons.

The only thing to double-check before you delete them is whether or not there are any good backlinks pointing to any of those pages. If there are good ones, either contact the site and ask them to update the link, or 301 it to a relevant page.