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Howdy from Dallas!

For what it is worth, you have 2 pages that you want to rank for the key term, but which one?   I took a quick first glance at them and here is what I saw (this was quick first glance remember).

On both of the pages you mention, you only have "Seo Houston" in the title and URL and don't mention it anywhere else on the page with the exception of having your Houston address in the footer.  Just glancing at your pages with my human eyes, I cannot see anything on the page that talks about why you are the best SEO in houston.

Your pages, read to me (with a quick glance) that you offer great SEO services and have great SEO resources, but not for houston per se.    You competitors do work SEO Houston into the text a lot to the point of being annoying, but at least I could see quickly that they service Houston.

I was thinking, it is a shame he does not have some case studies on that page that talk about what he did for some Houston businesses, that would be a good way to work Houston into the copy with our looking spammy.  On second look of your SEO Houston page, I saw the links to the case studies.  Now, if I want to see the case studies, you take me to another page, plus I cannot tell by reading the original page if these are Houston based businesses or not.  You might be helping some business from New York City for all I know!

I then thought, lemme find out more about this guy, he is probably pretty good, and I go to the about us page.  I see the item about the Houston Business Journal, and I think, that info should be on his SEO Houston page, a natural thing to talk about that can pull in the key phrase.  I go back to your Houston SEO page a third time and then notice the H1 tag.  I think I scrolled past it the first time as I looked at the graphics on the page and scanned.

I went back to writing this response and then looked at the page the fourth time and see, a-ha!  SEO houston is in the copy 1x and among all the logos at the bottom there is a logo to the Houston Business Journal.

I hope this makes sense, as a user, I had to do a lot of work to see that you specialize in SEO in houston.  I do not think you need to you do not need to H-Town, Hustle Town or Clutch City the heck out of your copy.  You have all the elements, but I would say it needs a little more work to find a happy medium between what you have now and how your competitors use the term.

Check out the 5 second test at UsabilityHub  http://fivesecondtest.com

If the user cannot tell in 5 seconds what you offer, then tweak the copy until they do without overkill.  That would be my first step before any backlink analysis or speed testing etc.  I think you have awesome stuff, it is just not hitting me as quickly when I first visit the page.

Good luck!

Never, ever use a 302.  People can disagree with me, but I have seen issues with how Google treats the 302s.  If you read the technical specifications on what a 302 is for, your example is a good use case.  The reality of how Google treats the URL is that you end up with 2 URLs indexed and then the new URL will stay indexed when you remove the 302.  It just ends up as a big mess.

Why not just show the new landing page design on the home page show a 200?  Just switch out the code for the page temporarily?  Google will just see the new info on the page, and it may help the old page if it was such a mess.  Save the old code and you can always switch it back.

Yes it helps. Some have seen 150% improvement

http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/04/27/want-a-150-boost-in-traffic-then-use-this-idiot-proof-guide-to-google-authorship-markup/

There is a great article on the Moz bog on how you even need to optimize the picture

http://moz.com/blog/google-author-photos

Don't wait - do it!

Just to make complete.  Google search console will list errors for pages with links coming from 3 general location

1. Crawling links on your website.  Starting from somewhere on your site and going link to link.

2. Crawling links in your sitemap.

3. Crawling URLs from your site that do not exist anymore on your site or sitemap.  I have seen Google keep things in memory and come back to hit pages again that are no longer from option 1 or option 2.  If you used to have a bunch of 301 directs in place for an old version of your website and then your developer changes something to delete all those 301s and they become 404s, you will find those pages showing up as errors again.  This is really useful as it can help diagnose the issue and you can fix it.

4. Crawling links from other sites.  Sometimes, this is how links get crawled for #3.

Here is what really sucks about Search Console and I mean sucks big bananas if you are trying to diagnose an issue.  If you look at your Search Console error page.  You can click on the URL in the report, it will pop up a box and then you can click the tab "Linked From" and see what pages are linking to the URL in question.  That is good!  If you then download the CSV, all of that info is lost.  If you have more than 20 errors to deal with, you do not have a practical way to manage things and see if there is a trend etc.  Otherwise you are left with clicking a lot of links in the report and taking lots of notes and going a little insane.

Good luck!

Seems like you would pass along the positive and negative link equity from that page to your home page.

My gut says that you would not want to pass a penalty of any type from one page to another.

Separate point here.  The 301 redirect passing equity is really only effective if there is a semantic relationship between the two pages.  In other words, if you have a page that ranks for red widgets and you 301 it to a page that is all about green bogies, you are not going to get much benefit.  Google also does not like a many to one relationship with 301s and so you want to try and minimize that anyway.

http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

"The new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity, but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link equity."

This is also a nice article here

http://miamiwebcompany.com/blog/study-website-recover-from-a-bad-301-redirect

So, even if there was no penalty, if not semantically relevant then it is really not worth it.

If you have to quote the law, then why not make the page more unique and provide more analysis around it.  Why not add information from other laws and legal input.  Nothing is ever 100% original.  All modern science is built upon the "shoulders of giants", they reference previous works and expand from there, but very commonly, summarizing (known as a meta analysis) is a new way of looking at old data and is considered original and helpful.

Say you needed to quote the law on drunk driving in a particular city. You probably need to not just quote the law, but answer the question, "If I get pulled over for drunk driving, what should I do?"  "If I need a lawyer what should I do?" "How do I find a good lawyer who specializes in drunk driving?"  Show stats on how many drunk driving offenses occur in that particular city and suburbs.  You get the idea.   If it is appropriate quote the law and then link back to the government page that you found it on.   Shoot a video with an expert talking about all these things - you get the idea.

None of the individual pieces are "original" per se, but pulling it all together is, and this is not only helpful to the user (who now does not have to spend all this time researching), but you have a great page that covers a nice range of keywords related to drunk driving laws.  The page I mention above is a very linkable and shareable page on the topic.

Quote the law, link to the reference, but build content around it and you can potentially rank for it.

Good luck!

It all depends on how the site works with Google.  Google has a "First Click Free" concept

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/74536?hl=en

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html

Basically, it allows Google (and everyone else) to have access to new content the first time they crawl it

This was modified to 5 clicks in 24 hours only

http://paidcontent.org/2009/12/01/419-google-modifying-its-first-click-free-program-for-subscription-sites-5/

According to this article

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/mar/26/telegraph-paywall

The Times is behind a full paywall.  You need to do some digging, heck ask the Times.   If they are not letting Google crawl it or a modified portion of it, you may not get SEO benefit "directly" (a la M. Cutts )

That said, there is a ton of indirect SEO that you can get from you.  If there are a bunch of people reading the paid version of the Time, they are going to tweet about it, talk about it on FB, mention it on blogs.  You will get direct referral traffic from it as well.  So, is it the same as a link from a publication that is completely free an online, no. I would not say that it makes it worthless.

Look at your analytics, how much traffic is coming from the Times?  Does it convert well?  If the answers are "lots" and "yes" - then keep doing it!  The other indirect benefits that I mention are gravy.

I would recommend that you try and get those pages out of your sitemap. If you look through the Google sitemap best practices, it states that the sitemap should be for pages that Googlebot can access.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/best-practices-for-xml-sitemaps-rssatom.html

URLs

URLs in XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds should adhere to the following guidelines:

• Only include URLs that can be fetched by Googlebot. **A common mistake is **including URLs disallowed by robots.txt — which cannot be fetched by Googlebot, or including URLs of pages that don't exist.

See Alan's points.  The answer is, it depends. 

Ironically, when I think about it, Alan is a good example of the type of person you are wanting to connect with.  He talks at all the conferences and has a great client list.  He is one of "the top people" for website SEO audits.  He is an expert in the field with a great reputation.   I would like to make more professional connections / mentors in the SEO world, with folks such as Alan, how could I connect with him?

I do follow Alan on Twitter.  I even referred a client to him here in Dallas.  I went to PubCon this year and attended a site review where he reviewed my site and went up and thanked him for his input and also introduced myself as the person who gave him a referral.  Today, I end up answering a question on Moz that he chimes in on and I get to engage with him again. Funny how that works out.

My opportunity here is that I am learning a lot about SEO audits in the process and potentially make a professional networking connection (notice the order there).  Does Alan know who I am? heck no!  This whole post is probably even creeping him out a bit.   That said, it has opened up another opportunity for me to have another conversation that can help me be better at what I do in working in the SEO area.

Good luck!

PS - Alan happy to buy you a beer anytime and talk shop.  Promise I will not suck the life force out of you - HA!

You may need to login to Google Search Console and check and see if you have a manual action of some sort.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippet-manual-actions-increase-21600.html

I did some digging, there are some cases where WP plugins have added so much markup it is overdone and that can cause issues.  I did not see the one you are using (Schema plugin v1.6.1) mentioned, but that does not mean it caused the issue.

Additional info

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippets-homepage-19205.html

http://www.thesempost.com/wordpress-recipe-plugins-causing-rich-snippet-manual-actions/

Subdomains are considered separate sites and so normally you would consider all the link metrics separate.  That is why the most common advice is to use subdirectories for content sections vs subdomains.  That way any link equity/page rank you acquire for links into the subdirectory flow up to the main domain.

You also need to be careful not to run into duplicate issues with a www vs non www versions of your site as those two subdomains are seen as separate entities by google.

If you want to consolidate link equity, 301 redirect all the pages in the blog subdomain (i.e. blog.root.com) to the equivalent subdirectory (root.com/blog) then you can have a unified single set of pages/URLs to focus on.

This may not be you, but simply due to what has been called "The great firewall of china" that slows things down.  This is an article that looked at a bunch of sites that were non-Chinese companies that hosted outside of the mainland and did a lot of business in China.

https://www.internetretailer.com/2014/08/14/foreign-retail-web-sites-load-slowly-china

Catchpoint says sites hosted outside of China often load slowly, because they are slowed by the so-called Great Firewall of China. For example, sites with the .cn domain—which are almost always hosted within China—typically are more than twice as fast as sites with .com in their domain names, Catchpoint says.

Regardless, I would not disable GA as you need that data to improve and understand your site traffic.  Facebook widgets can slow you down, but you have to determine if they help with your sales or not.  Your best bet is to try and design your site to be as simple as possible.  Cut down on all the Javascript menus etc.  Design your site for a mobile experience, then expand out from there.  Trim down your CSS file as much as possible.  Don't use typekit or other services with custom fonts.  Get lean and mean.

All paid links should be no-followed.   Google is very clear about this

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

Can Google always tell if links are paid or not, no.  Do the eventually figure out things, yes.  If they figure it out in this case (and they might for the reasons you mention) that site could get penalized.   Even if Google did not penalize, when the ad campaign ends, those links go away and the value goes away.

I would stay on the conservative side and ask that those links get no-followed.  Try and find away to reap the benefits of the click through traffic from those ads.

I find that taking all the punched holes from my hole puncher and tossing them in the air and then pretending I am in a parade while I wave to all my admirers feels pretty good.

Short answer - no.   It is true that Google looks at your internal link structure to see what the most important pages are on your site. So, if you have a link in your footer that is on every single page of the site, you are telling Google that this is an important page for your site.

That is only half the equation.

If the page you link to is a sitemap (a page with a bunch of internal links on it) then this will help Google find and crawl those pages, but since the sitemap is simply a list of links, it will not rank for anything etc.

The sitemap is simply a tool to help Google find all the pages on your site. It does not mean those pages will rank well. If you want a page to rank well, you have to have good content on it and also good external links to it (to keep this point simple).

If this is an HTML sitemap that you have setup, I would suggest also setting up an XML sitemap on your site and submitting that via Google Search Console.  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en  You can then not only help Google further crawl your site, but Search Console gives you feedback on if there are any errors in the XML sitemap and what your ratio is of pages that Google finds in the XML sitemap to how many Google has indexed.

The link that kosta list relates to the use of the rel=canonical for multi lingual pages.

I would point you to Dr. Pete (below) and I think he has good advice. I also love to eat cannonscicles, but that is another story.  Generally, you can do it, but you need to know what you are doing to make sure that you do not screw something up.

I had an issue on a site where Google was still caching old URLs on our site, even though we had relaunched the URL structure and setup 301 redirects - over two years prior.  An SEO consultant we work with suggested dropping in the self canonicalizing (sp?) links and over a period of a couple of months the old URLs were replaced in the Google SERPs and GWT report pages.

Cheers!

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

"(6) Is It OK to Put Rel=Canonical on My Entire Site?

Should you pre-emptively rel=canonical your entire site – even if many of the pages aren’t subject to duplicate content issues? I think this gets very speculative. We have recommended this approach at SEOmoz in the past, and I think it’s generally safe. I do worry that excessive use of rel=canonical could cause search engines to devalue and even ignore those tags, but I can’t point to any clear evidence of this happening. I also worry that people often implement site-wide rel=canonical tags badly, and end up pointing them to the wrong pages.

I do think that a pre-emptive rel=canonical on your home-page is generally a good ideas, as home pages are prone to URL variations. In a perfect world, I’d say to use rel=canonical on the home-page, known duplicates, and any pages with parameters that could drive duplicate content, and leave the rest alone. However, that’s often a very difficult procedure. In some cases, site-wide rel=canonical implementation is better than no index control."

View this video by Robert Cialdini on the 6 universal areas of influence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4ZcStMsss8

Then buy his book.  He spoke at PubCon last year in Vegas, and just to hear him talk was worth the price of the conference.  He has scientific studies that show the impact of these factors.  Use them to craft that email, make that phone call etc.  You will be amazed at how much these factors come into play.

You mention 301s and canonical not being available - are you absolutely sure?  Try and ask the host again, sometimes when you get another customer service person you may get an answer.  The canonical would be idea.

I would not delete the old posts.  They have links to them and get traffic.  Couple of ideas come to mind.  You could basically write up a short original summary of each post and put it on the old blog.  Then have something like, if you want more information, this article has moved to and then link to the new blog post.  That would at least drive referral traffic and would take care of the duplicate issue.  In the absence of a canonical link, having a link to the "original" does help give credit.  The link to the new site would also work to give credit for the post to the new site.  At the same time, this will be kind of messy as when you change the content on the posts on the old site, you could potentially mess up the rankings of those pages.

I would test this out.  Select 10-20 articles from the old site, and see what happens.  As a comparison, take another 10-20 and just cut off the blog post after 300 words and then link to the full article on the new site.

I will be honest, as I read my suggestion, this will be kind of messy.   Go back and push for that canonical.  You can then link and copy and you will be totally clean.  All you need is access to the HEAD portion of the pages.  They look to have a "premium" option if you pay, maybe that would give you access?

Good luck!

I will be honest, I am not sure there is a 100% right answer for this.  Most of what you see are general guidelines on what to do, but you probably need to see how your audience reacts.

There is a general article here on when best to email on time of day.

http://blog.getresponse.com/best-time-to-send-email-infographic.html

There is some logic as you do not want to email people when they are commuting etc.

There is a good article by Survey Monkey

http://blog.surveymonkey.com/blog/2011/08/16/day-of-the-week/

They show for B2C that Mondays are best.

Another study by another company mention Mondays and Wednesdays

http://www.servicetick.com/blog/do-survey-response-rates-change-by-day-of-week/

Here is another article that looked at several other articles and they mention Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays

http://www.peoplepulse.com.au/Invite-Timing-Tips.htm

This article mentions Wednesdays and Thursdays

http://blog.sogosurvey.com/sending-out-surveys-its-all-about-timing-get-the-timing-right/

Do you get where I am going here?  If I were to keep looking for studies, I bet I could probably even find a few that recommend weekends.  Why?  Probably because people get sick of all the surveys that are sent during the week!

Take a read through and see if you can find any parallels between the groups that these articles studied and the group you are emailing. It would probably also help if you did some persona work.  Who are your website visitors what are they normally doing.  Example, if your website caters to a bunch of teachers, maybe Friday afternoon is better as they are done with all the school stuff for the week.  Add that to all the above, and do a back of the napkin meta analysis and you will probably have a pretty good starting point.

Good luck!

You are looking at two different types of queries, but yes, you should focus on having the city name plus the product.  While Google does localize results based on IP and personalized preferences, it is not not completely independent of keyword optimization.

Another way to think about this is that, lets say that Google only took into consideration the IP of the user versus what the keyword the user typed into the query.  How would Google know where you are local to?  It is partially due to the keywords you have on the page related to your location.

You should be able to optimize for both your location and product by using a combination of the keyword (and variants of it) and the city

See what the most common term using KW research and then vary off of that.  So if Houston Plumbers is the main keyword you can use that and variants of it.  (Plumbers in Houston, Plumbers near Houston, Dependable Houston Based Plumbers etc).

I have seen pages that I have optimized using this methodology on large scale Yellow Page type sites for a number of products/services and had the page rank on Page 1 for both types of searches such as "Dallas Plumber" (locality plus product service) and "Plumber" (product/service only).  Obviously, your mileage may vary depending on the competition, but, the basic message is that you are going the right direction when targeting locality + product/service vs just service alone.  The error in your case would be to leave out the location information.

Good luck.