Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There are a few bits and pieces that could be improved on the site but really, I think the biggest issue is going to be that amount of duplication.

Having a small volume or percentage of pages with identical content isn't going to kill your site, Even now, you're ranking #3... you're definitely not penalised, just seen as slightly lower quality now. Besides pricing, there doesn't really seem to be any need to have an entire subset of pages for each country since the only thing that seems to change is the price.

If it were my site, I'd be culling all the country code subdirectories and having the price generate dynamically based on the user's location. If you're in the US, show US pricing in USD, if you're in Australia then you get the Aus price in AUD etc.

It will give you fewer redundant pages to manage, less duplication and help out with your crawl budget efficiency as well.

Admittedly I've only checked from Australia, but your site speed could do with some improvement too

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/shwoodshop.com/A31MtKKC

Headings carry weight based on their formatting (font size, font weight etc) and location. Regardless of how you go about this, moving the heading down the page is going to steadily decrease that value from my understanding. For both users and search engines.

Moving it down a few lines is no big deal  but if you're moving it 1000px below the fold, it's a strange choice

Search engines will render your page, including CSS so they see it essentially the same way as the end user.

1) Analytics data is based on the UA code on the page. Assuming your pages are built on a template, by default the UA code for yyy.com is going to receive the visit, not yours. You could ask them to put your UA code on there but... that kind fo defeats the purpose of having analytics in the first place when you're blurring the data!

2) From a user perspective, it would be a little confusing to click a top nav link and end up on another website, so yeah I would suggest putting that link somewhere else on the site and making it clear that they're about to leave yours. Bonus points for using target="_blank" to open that other page in a new tab, also for user experience.

**3) **Right again. If yyy.com has nothing to do with xxx.com (as in the owners of X and Y don't even know each other) then it's a very strange request and one I'd be hesitant to even entertain.

The quality of their site can hurt you to a minor extent, I'd just be more worried about the confusing user experience and the fact that you'd be electively sending your users to their site, while they offer you... what?

The reason they want that link up there is simply the implied strength of that location. Link value is typically seen in order of priority from top left to bottom right; a link in your top nav gives them a sitewide link from almost the very top of every page. Good for them I suppose, though sitewide links aren't great, but not something you should do.

Either of these options is ok depending on the context, as Laura mentioned.

As always, if there's no real reason for both pages to exist then I'd suggest using a 301 to point that old page to the new one.

What your friend is talking about is actually a subdomain, not a subdirectory. If you had subdomains like sf.website.com and la.website.com then yes, they're be treated as separate entities. Subfolders aren't that much of a big deal.

That said, the simpler your site structure, the better. It's going to help your crawl budget and if you have the opportunity to simplify a site you plan to work on for years, why not spend a few hours doing it now and save yourself the heartache for years to come?

The short and generic answer is yes, it will lower the strength you're receiving from that site but it won't drop it to 1/20th.

More links is a good thing if those links make sense but the more you have, the less strength each of them carries; 20 links will not offer 20x the strength of 1 link, if that makes sense

1.) what platforms or industries or sectors do online marketing well?

Industries that do SEO well are always going to be the tough verticals. Because they're so competitive, the barrier for entry there is quite high; if you want to compete for the big terms in the accommodation industry but your SEO is only 60% there, you're probably going to be burried on page 5. That same level of work in a local trade industry may see you toward the top of page 1 because you have no real competition.

As for platforms, all the major ones (Wordpress, Magento etc) are going to be great. There are different senarios where one may be better than the other but as a general rule, they're on a reasonably even playing field with their respective pros and cons. Where they sometimes fall apart is low quality developers making the site. The platform itself may be easy to use but if it was designed in a way that requires a 10 minute process to update your page titles, you're going to have a bad time!

2.) what platforms or industries or sectors do online marketing badly?

The only industries I've seen where most players do it badly are things like adult products, gambling and pharmaceuticals.

I'm sure there are some good ones out there but they're exceptions to the rule from what I've seen.

By "badly", I mean they use black hat tactics and aren't opposed to destroying their competitor's link profile to move up another spot.

3.) is doing online marketing well or bad a function of the platform, industry, size of business, budget, knowledge, tools?

Being able to observe great SEO is a function of strong competition. _Doing _strong SEO is really a combination of all factors you mentioned. Really, you should have a platform that's easy to work with and offers good site speed, an industry suitable for your resources (if you're a sole operator doing your own SEO, competing with someone like Trip Advisor is possible... but probably not the best idea.). More budget and knowledge generally means you can work faster and climb those results at a more impressive pace.

Also there are many industries .. .who may to varying degrees rely on online marketing to drive leads and keep the phone ringing.

About the only industries that need SEO are those who exist almost entirely online. If you're running a small ecommerce store and nobody can find you online, it's going to be a struggle. Having said that, almost any business can benefit greatly from good SEO.

Hi Marcel,

Internal linking between your blog posts is something you should definitely be doing, as long as they're relevant to each other. If one blog post is helpful to a user, linking to a related one may give them that bit of extra info they needed.

On the other hand, linking from your blogs to landing pages is something I'd avoid. Blogs are meant to be informative and/or starting a conversation. Linking to your products or services will often make the whole post feel like it was just written to promote what you do.

There are some exceptions to this but they are rare.

Also, don't get too tied up in using keywords as your anchor text. Just use whatever anchor makes sense and if it happens to have the keywords in there then that's great too.

Hi Dani,

As John mentioned, there are so many factors involved that it's very tough to accurately pinpoint the reasons why a site might start losing rankings.

To answer your question directly - no, there is no tipping point where your link profile just isn't strong enough to carry a certain volume of pages. There is a similar scenario that could happen but I'll get to that in a moment.

The other thing is that to my knowledge, the traffic data in Ahrefs isn't 100% accurate like Analytics, it's more of an estimation based on extrapolating a smaller pool of data. I'm not completely sure about this but that's my understanding. Basically, the drops you're seeing might not actually be as pronounced as the graph indicates.

So, the type of scenario where there are "too many pages" is moreso related to the user experience. If you're creating large volumes of pages just for "better SEO", you're going to have a bad time. If your site has 20 real pages and 80 pages just targeting a keyword then this is where you're like to start seeing a drop in your rankings as the overall quality signals on your site begin to dip.

Users don't enjoy keyword-heavy and redundant pages and the metrics will demonstrate this to search engines very quickly.

You should always be looking to improve the strength of your link profile, but if you're worried about creating too many pages, don't be. Create the pages that make sense for the user, provide a great user experience and you'll be fine.

They can be incredibly effective and in some instances a necessity. The problem with them is the number of potential issues that can see them quickly change intent from high quality, helpful pages to keyword-stuffed trash.

There are three major issues we come across here on a semi-regular basis and they come down to communication, though none of them are easy to resolve:

**"Our service is the same everywhere" **- Every now and then we get a client who insists that their product or service is exactly the same everywhere, even when we know for a fact that it isn't. This makes it incredibly hard to build effective local pages because all we can do is offer info on the generic differences of their vertical rather than the unique characteristics of this particular business.

"All the top ranking competitors are using the keyword constantly in their content; the fact that you haven't leads me to believe you don't know what you're doing" - We take the educational approach right from our original proposal all the way through but sometimes, there is a not-so-silent business partner or the owner's family member who "knows SEO" and claims that our lack of spam means we're a waste of money after a few weeks of a campaign. Fun!

**"We need a landing page for every combination of location and service" **4 services across 10 locations? We need 40 landing pages!!! Obviously, this is always an absolute "no".

Irritating as these things really are, the solution is always the same. Run through the project plan again, educate them on why we're going down this route, provide some external sources like Miriam's great post and encourage questioning. The vast majority of the time this gets everyone back on the same team and a productive, well-optimised site. Every now and then it means we simply don't work for that client anymore if they continue to insist on spam.

Miriam's guide on this echoes our internal thoughts and process almost exactly and the key message is to never create local landing pages if they have no business existing in the first place. A question we so often ask here: if Google didn't exist, would you still perform that task?

I agree with Eric here so I won't repeat what he has said, simply offer additional suggestions.

Firstly, you can click on each entry from that Crawl Errors window in your screenshot and from the window that pops up, check out the "Linked From" tab. It will show you all the pages this broken one has links from.

If you're having no joy finding them on the pages manually, you can try the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Crawl the site and if the 404s show up here (if they don't they probably don't exist anymore and you can mark them as "fixed" in Search Console) then click them and check out the "Linked From" tab at the bottom. This tool shows you not only the pages it's linked from but also the anchor text so you can go to the linking pages and use ctrl+f to find the offening link(s).

Hope that helps!

The others are right, you should be looking for another company to provide you with unique posts for both UX and search engine reasons.

I wouldn't expect that you'll find yourself with a penalty since it will look more like poorly managed syndication than anything else but at the same time, you're not going to get any value out of it.

The best ways to handle it would be to use one of the three methods (preferably rel=canonical) that tell search engines that your content came from one of the other sites it has been posted on but of course, doing this essentially says "this isn't my content, please give me no credit for it" which begs the question... why pay for it?

404s do hurt both user experience and ranking potential. As far as rankings go, it will hurt you site-wide too since it's an indication of your site's quality.

Releasing it without some products isn't the end of the world. The 404s will be a problem though - I would not recommend launching a website with any 404s, much less a collection of them.

If the links to these pages are just in the nav, it should be easy enough to comment those out temporarily so you don't see those 404s. What you end up with then is just a website that sells fewer products really.

Hi Bryan,

No offence taken by any of us, I'm sure. It's an unfortunate fact that our industry has a number of... dodgy providers.

In any case, our process is quite similar to Danny in that we use a 2 stage interview process and a test.

Ours is broken into 2 parts. A very short phone interview to cover the boring old cliche questions like "why did you leave your last job?" and " what are you looking for from this role?" I'll also throw in a bit of a qualifying question that could raise some obvious red flags so I can filter out the ones that just aren't going to work out. This saves my time and, more importantly, saves their time and travel costs. If they're out of work, the last thing they need is to be travelling to an interview they just aren't right for.

For those that make it past this step, they're invited in for a face to face interview. This one is about getting to know who they are; no technical questions. This gives me a solid indication of whether or not they'll be a good cultural fit for our team (very important to us here!) and if this seems fine, they're asked to complete a 10-question test which should take about  5 - 10 minutes.

It asks basic questions that anyone with the experience required for the role will almost roll their eyes at because it's so easy - "what is the purpose of a page title and where is the average user likely to see it most?" - that type of thing.

All of this lets me know what sort of technical ability they have, how well they can communicate, what sort of person they are, what they're looking to achieve and whether or not they can articulate answers to basic questions under a bit of pressure.

Then, if we end up with 2 candidates who seem evenly matched in every way, we arrange a Mortal Kombat style fight to the death.

Seriously though, being ecommerce, if you do go this route make sure you include specific questions about SEO for ecommerce. They can fall under a few different rules as far as how they should be set out, how to deal with potential content duplication etc.

Hi Jenifer,

This is an interesting one and I honestly can't figure out what's going on here. Could there be some section(s) of the site that have been obscured that maybe I can't see but Google is picking up?

There are quite a few problems I found in a quick skim of the HTML which might be the problem but honestly this is grasping at straws. It's something I would definitely recommend fixing for separate reasons. See if it makes any difference to this problem but I doubt it will.

An example of what I've noticed:

_widht="100%">

This report from W3C highlights a bunch of others, though not all of them. This report is mostly a red flag that the HTML could do with some attention to tidy up and get more functional._

Hi Jenifer,

Very hard to say without being able to take a look at the site. If you're comfortable dropping a link here I can take a closer look for you?

If you can browse to both without either of them redirecting then you've got duplicate pages. You can tell if they're redirecting because the address will change.

This is a handy resource from Google on exactly this topic

This isn't a huge deal but at the same time, it's not a difficult one to fix so you might as well.

Subfolder. A subdomain is viewed by search engines as a different website which means you're not getting the strength of your existing link profile.

Subdomains are great if you have sections of your site that you don't want/need to rank (think login.website.com or members.website.com) but if we're talking about a common example like blog.website.com vs website.com/blog, always the latter.

Hi Alex,

There is certainly some merit in ranking for the more generic terms, it just depends on time/budget and the aim of their SEO.

If they're just looking to drive direct sales, the Vancouver terms are obviously going to be the way to go. If they want to grow their brand strength, spread their reach and ultimately become synonymous with the industry then going for the broader terms is a better option.

One is a low effort, low reward campaign while the other is the exact opposite - which one to choose becomes a business decision for them to make, really. That industry is a gold mine for great, educational content so developing a strategy for the broad terms would be a breeze, it will just be very time consuming to do right.

You're currently on the right track and for all the right reasons. As a user, I'd rather see the surgery rather than an individual doctor and as you mentioned, splitting your reviews across multiple doctors isn't ideal.

From your side of things, you're obviously better off having the doctor's surgery listed and having the potential to drive traffic to the website.

Another factor that I'm not 100% sure about is how the current situation of individual doctors being listed will play with Google guidelines.