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There's no problem here if they're all completely separate sites and all have completely unique content.

Assuming both are correct, it's not really any different to having competitor websites in the same niche.

Nope, unfortunately not. Donford's answer is the only way you can remove those sitelinks without hurting your SEO.

Google wants to provide users with the best possible experience and sometimes this means providing them with links to the strongest/most used parts of your site directly from the SERPs. You can at least take it as a positive that they're showing up!

I think I'm a little confused here as to what you mean by "product" in the context of real estate. Are you referring to different types of listings (e.g. office lease, retail lease etc?)

If I were designing a real estate website, the structure would be as follows:

website.com/listing-type/state/area/suburb

You mentioned the site isn't in English so just to clarify above, the last two will be depend on regional user preferences. For example, here in Brisbane (Aus) it would be expected that I can search for properties in the "Greater Brisbane" area, meaning Brisbane City and surround suburbs. Within that region there are a bunch more suburbs

More specifically:

website.com/office-lease/qld/greater-brisbane/west-end

The reason I'd be doing this is that not only is it an easy logic to follow but it really caters toward a user's intent. If I'm looking for an office space to lease, there's no point in presenting me with all types of listings from an area because all I want to see are office leases.

Having those lease types further up your hierarchy is going to give them a little more preferences in terms of SERP position as well. From what I understand, these are the sub-category pages you're looking to rank?

As a working example of this as well, I just had a look at realestate.com.au's URL structure and it's the same as my suggestions above. Their site is very flat because it's almost entirely search-driven but the URL still lets us see their site architecture

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-townhouse-qld-spring+hill-416944062

Looks like other comments have covered the duplicate pages so I won't go into that but to answer your other question about page titles for thousands of products, templates are your friend.

I'd suggest manually crafting the page titles for your key landing pages, categories and potentially sub-categories depending on how many there are. The below info is for the individual product pages.

Just set them up in your CMS to use descriptive variables. It won't always be perfect but short of writing thousands of titles and constantly writing new ones for new products, it's the most viable.

For example, if you sold car tyres, the page titles for your product pages would look something like this:

[Product Name] - [Product Number] | Your Website Name

What you end up with is auto-generated page titles like this (details clearly fabricated):

TreadMax Pro Tyres - XVN90P | Ed's Tyre Warehouse
Performax Ultra Tyres - PUH862 | Ed's Tyre Warehouse

Like I said, these aren't ideal. A good page title should be far more compelling but we have to reach a reasonable compromise. The thing to remember here is that if these individual products are showing up for someone in the SERPs, they've probably searched for something like an exact product name or product ID. Since they're toward the end of that sales funnel already, simply showing the product name and ID can be all they really need.

Hope this helps!

Hi there!

If this were my client, I'd be having a very serious and educational chat about the direction the campaign is headed and strip it back to basics. The below suggestions assume the site doesn't currently rank anywhere that's going to bring them any real volume of traffic.

Remove the Subdomains Subdomains are treated as separate websites so sanfrancisco.website.com is viewed as a completely different website to seattle.website.com. While that may be ok for the end user, what this means for optimisation is 2 different link building campaigns, two sets of content (both of which need to be unique and still genuinely valuable) and 2 sets of ranking signals.

You mentioned they have 14 locations set out like this so what you've actually got is 14x the work needed. Honestly, this is not a good use of your time or their budget.

Remove the Spammy Blog Posts The reality is, nobody is likely to actually read a series of blog posts that are so blatantly keyword heavy. The most probable outcome is that users will be given a very low quality vibe and steer clear of the brand in the future.

Also, having that much keyword spam on your site is playing with fire. It doesn't provide a good user experience and search engines these days are easily capable of understanding exactly the aim.

Blog Posts Don't Target Keywords

Blog posts should absolutely have a target audience and perhaps a common search phrase in mind, but they shouldn't really have a keyword focus like other pages on your site - there should never be a post that's built around the phrase Insurance San Francisco for example.

Focus Your Time; Work on the Primary Domain

As I touched on above, splitting your time across 14 subdomains is not a great use of your time or their budget at all. Rather than trying to churn out 60 low quality blog posts from questionable sources to meet this arbitrary requirement, spend that same time writing 1 or 2 high quality, uniquely valuable posts each week then promoting them through various channels like social media, influencer outreach etc. It's going to give you far better quality signals than huge amounts of rubbish across 14 subdomains.

More importantly, this approach gives users a reason to stay on your site and build that crucial rapport. in the insurance industry, people tend to shop around and do their research for a bit before they commit to the purchase and swamping them in keyword spam is not a way to build that relationship.

Go Back to Basics

From my experience, any site that's in this bad shape is probably going to have a lot of other fundamental issues (thin, keyword heavy content, a terrible backlink profile, poorly structured and keyword heavy navigation etc) that really should be addressed before even thinking about blog posts.

If this were my client I'd be treating it like a brand new website and going from the top. Ignore the domains and plan to take them offline, plan the site architecture and nav then get to work on improving the site one element at a time with a heavy focus on the user experience and the real end goal (traffic that converts) rather than keywords and SERP position.

You can rank #1 all day long but if your site is heavily spammy, it isn't going to convert!

That's probably not what you wanted to hear and perhaps not the sort of info that you're looking for here but to be honest, I think any further time that gets tipped into forging ahead with those spammy subdomains is time very poorly spent. I hope you find it helpful either way!

It may be that the client is very reluctant to such a drastic change so it would take a very strong educational approach and, if they're financially driven, focus on the fact that optimising a single site, they need to pay you to do less work for more return; "more for less".

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?

This really comes down to a question of page and domain strength. Just like regular organic results, their placement in the local pack is going to depend on a number of relevancy/geo signals in conjunction with the usual trust factors.

If the new website is going to have a full campaign attached to it and specifically targeting that store's location then I'd suggest using this one. If the national site is going to be the stronger one, perhaps the SEO time is better spent focussing on that site rather than splitting it across two.

Hi Malika,

From the info you've provided, removing those 301s is going to be a good idea.

Below is a relevant section from a Google Developers article. The article is specifically referring to mobile site speed but the point applied to desktop as well.

"(2) Number of redirects should be minimized
Additional HTTP redirects can add one or two extra network roundtrips (two if an extra DNS lookup is required), incurring hundreds of milliseconds of extra latency on 3G networks. For this reason, we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely - this is especially important for the HTML document (avoid “m dot” redirects when possible)."

If you're 100% sure there are no backlinks or traffic heading to those old domains, there's no reason to keep the redirects in place, particularly if the redirected pages are old enough that it's unlikely anyone has them saved in an old email or under their browser favorites.

There is some level of SEO value to be had from these but as the other comments have touched on, they're not necessarily the best ways to go about it.

Done correctly, each of these methods are perfectly fine, just make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. For example, don't just start dumping links all over Reddit and play the numbers game. You risk getting banned but more importantly, the best you can hope for is a negative association with your brand name.

On the other hand, if you have a resource that is very relevant to a particular topic then by all means, link to it. As an example, if you find a thread looking for specific data on a topic and you happen to have a (quality!) infographic that addresses the query perfectly, you're going to genuinely help answer the question and this is the key factor.

Also, each of these should be used sparingly. If 80% of your link profile consists of Stumbleupon links, you're not going to gain all that much strength.

Hi Bob,

You're mostly on the right track here, especially with taking out that footer spam. Rather than just relying on Analytics to locate your keyword targets (most of this is obscured these days and it only shows how people are finding you now rather than where they could find you), take a quick look at the Moz and Backlinko guides on advanced KW research.

These guides are very thorough and the process involved is time-consuming but worth the effort. If you are very heavily time-restricted, I'd suggest at least grabbing data from Google's Keyword Planner and SEMrush to point you in the right direction.

In terms of the content, there are two things to be mindful of there; both quality and quantity. The quality should be the most important factor, addressing the user intent rather than just filling an arbitrary word count. As for quantity, my recommendation is always 1500+ words per landing page. Of course, this much content should be styled in a way that doesn't just appear as a massive wall of text.

In terms of creating new pages, just create the ones that are going to make sense to the user.  Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday that I find myself referencing a lot around here on how to go about ranking for multiple locations when you only have the one office.

Good question Matt and a tough one to answer!

In a general sense, good SEOs can become very powerful entrepreneurs if they put the time into it. We already have exposure to a broad number of industries and have a great understanding of just how those clients go about finding various products and services.

Combine this with our well-versed ability to plan, document, communicate and build a powerful network of people we can leverage effectively as well as access to designers and devs and there are few things we can't do well in the online space.

As for how we can apply our skillset within SEO, I completely agree with John-Henry in that the same tactics we use for link prospecting can be fantastic for outbound marketing. Used effectively, they can ultimately turn an outbound campaign into inbound leads; potential clients seeking you out as a result of your demonstrated value and the referral network you've built.

hmm, that's very strange. You may be right that's it's simply a trust factor here then, though the .org site would have been to considerably stronger than the .com to rank higher for your own TLD!

I've seen this plenty of times with brand names being outranked but not domains. Perhaps an SEO revision is a good place to start and compare this against the .org?

Building links is important for SEO but if you're just starting out on a fresh site, I don't suggest starting there. Spend the time improving the website's onsite factors and overall user experience so it's a place users want to go.

It can be difficult to build legitimate backlinks if your site is very thin on content and hard to use because, quite simply, it doesn't look trustworthy.

We've had great success in competitive industries by starting almost exclusively with onsite elements then steadily shifting the focus toward building genuine links. Below are just some of the more important elements we work on in the early days, regardless of industry. These are in no particular order:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headings
• Nav structure and layout
• URL structure
• Landing page content (my recommendation is 1500+ words of uniquely valuable content per landing page though this figure is anecdotal - better to have 1000 words of good content than to pad it out with rubbish for the sake of an arbitrary word count)
• Site speed
• Call to action
• Overall user experience - how easy is it for users to satisfy their intent on your site?

There are certainly plenty more things to consider which Moz and Backlinko cover quite well. The important thing to remember here is that you're not jumping through arbitrary hoops to "improve rankings", you're building a trustworthy, more helpful website for users. The early ranking improvements are really just a side-benefit in the short term.

The concept of article submissions is thankfully quite dead these days. There are some instances where it makes sense but very rarely. Just like everything else in SEO, if done with the right intent (providing a helpful resource, not just building a backlink) then it can be done with reasonable success but there are better ways to spend your time.

Also, backlinks from social media are quite different to a link from another website. These "social mentions" are important because while they may or may not directly improve your rankings, they do work to build a stronger image for your brand; "146,000 people follow this brand on Facebook, they're obviously quite a strong company!".

I hope at least some of this proves helpful! Don't forget to do some thorough competitor analysis to see what your competition is up to as well. You'll never beat someone by copying them but their tactics might spark some great ideas.

Assuming you're just searching for "www.domain.com" and not using any operators (e.g. site:www.domain.com),  then there are quite a few things that could cause this.

The two most likely possibilities:

• The site is currently blocking crawlers via robots.txt; search engines are not allowed to crawl your site meaning it can't be indexed
• It has been penalised for some reason. There are so many ways to end up in a penalty, algorithmic or manual.

Oh, if they're just pages that are part of a template you're using then you can safely get rid of them without having to redirect.

Just make sure you remove all internal links to those deleted pages so you don't end up with 404s.

I can't say I've seen an instance of that happening before but chances are it's just being redirected via the htaccess file.

Through htaccess you can essentially say if the URL is prefaced with https://, redirect to the other domain.

As far as SEO benefits, there really are none that I'm aware of. Looking purely at rankings, the only value this will pass is ~90% of link juice from any links that explicitly point to the https version. From a legitimate SEO point of view (ie actually caring about users) it's more than likely going to give them a very confusing experience!

There are instances where it makes sense to push users to a https version and maybe a new subdomain or something (from www.store.com to https://www.store.website.com) but even then, there aren't too many instances where that would be ideal.

Hi Michael, thanks for the input.

I completely agree with you about content length but perhaps I'm a little confused here.

If search engines aren't going to see content hidden by jquery, would that not mean the only content I'm seen to have is what's immediately visible on page load?

Hi Steve, Wix is one platform I'm really not too familiar with unfortunately. I've probably spent 20 minutes with it in total!

If you don't want these pages on your site, the best thing to do is 301 it to the most relevant page, provided that redirect makes sense to the user. For example, if it's a page about office chairs, you don't want to be redirecting the user to a page about televisions!

hmm, that's frustrating!

The canonicalization idea isn't going to work too well since it essentially passes the strength of one page to the other so you will still only end up with a single page that ranks. Also, it doesn't present a great user experience. If anything, it probably further confuses the fact that they're both the same thing!

If you've got offices in multiple locations, you can go with a number of ideas from Rand's Whiteboard Friday on a related topic. If this does apply to you, you could use the most common term for each region. Location pages for Western states would talk about Attorneys and Western states focus on Lawyer.

It's far from ideal but if Google isn't understanding the difference here, it's about the best option I can see.

So, I'm in 2 minds about this; let me start with a bit of background info.

Context
We have a new client who is in the final days of their new site design and were when they first contacted us. Their design essentially uses 5 pages, each with several pages worth of content on each, separated with the use of jquery. What this means is a user can click a menu item from a drop-down in the nav and be taken directly to that section of content like using internal anchor links as if it were a separate page, or they can click the top-level nav item and scroll through each "sub-page" without having to click other links.

Vaguely similar to Google's "How Search Works" page if each sector of that page had it's own URL, only without the heavy design elements and slow load time.

In this process, scrolling down to each new "sub-page" changes the URL in the address bar and is treated as a new page as far as referencing the page, adding page titles, meta descriptions, backlinks etc. From my research this also means search engines don't see the entire page, they see each sub-page as their own separate item like a normal site.

My Reservations I'm worried about this for several reasons, the largest of them being that you're essentially presenting the user with something different to the search engines. The other big one being that I just don't know if search engines really can render this type of formatting correctly or if there's anything I need to look out for here.

Since they're so close to launching their new site, I don't have time to set up a test environment and I'm not going to gamble with a new corporate website but they're also going to be very resistant to the advice of "start the design over, it's too dangerous".

The Positives
For this client in particular, the design actually works very well. Each of these long pages is essentially about a different service they offer and the continuous scrolling through the "sub-pages" acts as almost a workflow through the process, covering each step in order.

It also looks fantastic, loads quickly and has a very simple nav so the overall user experience is great. Since the majority of my focus in SEO is on UX, this is my confusion. Part of me thinks that obscuring the other content on these pages and only showing each individual "sub-page" to search engines is an obvious no-no, the other part of me feels that this kind of user experience and the reasonable prevalence of AJAX/Paralax etc means search engines should be more capable of understanding what's going on here.

Can anyone possibly shed some light on this with either some further reading or first-hand experience?