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Agree 100%.   I should have mentioned.  We use a slide out on our site and it is pretty effective.  We did AB testing to look at the best verbiage on the slide out and we also did some user testing to see the best timing for when and how to slide out.

This is still there.  Look under your Campaigns (Button on the top right) and select the site/campaign from the list you want to review.  Once within a campaign, click on "Crawl Diagnostics" in the subnav.  I like to export to CSV to look through things - but this is all there.

They are different and you need to setup 301s to correct, also check all your menus etc to make sure that you use them consistently - this includes in emails etc - consistency is the key.

You can go with slashes or no slashes, as long as you are consistent, I have run sites both ways.

I will disagree with Jesse one thing - I would strongly recommend using the ending slash.  I have several reasons why.

1. The url ending in a slash traditionally represents a folder with pages/documents/images inside that folder.  Used to be that we would use a URL like /folder/index.htm with index.htm being the default page.   It used to be that if you did not designate any file as an index file, assuming the permissions on the folder were set correctly, you would see all the content in that folder.  Later, you could designate a default index file and so when you left it blank by ending in a slash it would show the content of the default page without needing the index.htm to be included.  Now this issue can cause duplicate content problems (but that is another story).

2. Knowing all that above, many of your web analytic and other reporting software would create reports using a given folder  Google Analytics is a good one.  If you use the conent drilldown tool, it automatically organizes your reports by looking at the slashes and then grouping pageviews and visits according to the folder structure.

3) Separately, you had development code that used the folder system in the url as a way to parse what the user wants and then deliver a page.  This is why you can now have a url like /article/file  and you do not need a .htm or .php or .html at the end as the server knows what to do with it without seeing the final extensions.

What happens then is that you end up with URLs like this

/toys/age6-8

/toys/age6-8/redball

/toys/age6-8/blueball

/toys/age9-10

/toys/age9-10/remote-car

/toys/age9-10/remote-control-train

You can see this is a toy store and they are grouping toys by age.  Balls are better for younger children vs remote vehicles for older children.  In your GA reporting, if you assume that a slash indicates a new folder

/toys/age6-8  would not be included in the report with the products as it would be seen as a page within the /toys/ folder.  Same thing with /toys/age9-10

You have your most important page not grouped with all the products it contains.

This is one of the reasons that I prefer ending with the slash.  Can you do it the other way, sure, but it just adds more hassle.  The folder ending in a slash is a convention that most people follow and frankly, you will find that users also tend to end in a slash when they put in a url.  You end up with links to your site where they have a slash and one is needed.

Old habits are hard to break and so this is why I recommend going with the ending slash.

Take a look at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0

to see what I am talking about.

Robots.txt does prevent crawling according to Matt Cutts.

Howdy,

We have heard about building microsites on sub-domains example city.domainname.com/keyword-or-service

I think this was more relevant when you were wanting to get an EMD, but I think that this is now less important.

We have heard about building sections off the root domain such as domainname.com/city/keyword-or-service

We have used this and had success with it.  If you look at Yelp, this is what they do as well.  I think you can also consolidate your SEO reputation more effectively. I think the advantage to the subdomain or separate domain approach is that if you get penalized on one, it should not impact the other.  If you keep to white hat approaches this should not be an issue.

We have heard about just pushing more content to the blog which can target a wider range of keywords and cities

If you setup the two options above, you can have a wide diversity of keywords and cities.  Don't see how a blog makes it any different in being able to target more keywords. You can hang a blog off of a folder ie.  domainname.com/city/blog and you can get the same effect.

We have heard about building a new site for each city location replicating the main website and swapping out content for 100% originality

The issue with this becomes scale what if you need a large number of cities covered, can you get all the domain names.  What if you have a user that wants to look in more than one city?  Just does not scale, especially if you want to build your main brand.   Also, when you consider all the different GA and GWT etc etc accounts you would need to setup to manage, it adds a lot of overhead.

We have heard about just building more and more backlinks with different anchor text using the cities in the anchor text

This is something you would have to do regardless of all of the above techniques.  You want backlinks to any page/site/etc with the city in the anchor text but with also a diversity of anchor text.

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Bottom line, you need to consider your brand on all of this.  People go to yelp as they are a trusted source and then they rank well with local cities around the US.  Same thing with places like Angies list.  Citysearch uses the subdomain, but that is more of a legacy thing, seems like most newer sites use the a single TLD and then build out locations in different folders.   Brand is what will make you different than all the other companies that sell the same products so IMHO the use of the single domain lets you build on that.

The canonical is sort of like a 301 redirect without actually redirecting the user reading the page.  So yes, if you publish the article, let it get indexed by Google then publish it in the blog with a canonical back to the article page you should be set.

That said, I think the better approach would be to write a shorter snippet of the article and publish that on the blog and then just provide a regular link back to the article a "if you want more information, read the full article).  If the blog is on a separate publishing network, you get the added benefit that you now have link (and you can optimize the anchor text) that points from "another site" aka the blog to your article.  This helps the article to rank in the SERPS in the long run.  You do not need to completely rewrite the article, just a short summary, do make sure it is not a carbon copy of your opening paragraph.  This really gives you more bang for the buck as a part of this process.

I really only use the canonical for things like, the printer friendly version of a page pointing to the originals etc.

Forget the industry standards.  This data should be in your clients analytics.  They should be able to see the %of traffic and conversion rates for organic vs paid vs direct.   I would bet that organic converts the best, and if that is true and you can increase the proportion of traffic from organic, then you have a winning solution for them that is specific to their site and industry.

On the Google News submission, these are reviewed by real people who look at your whole site.  Yes, you have to have things setup correctly from a technical level (IDs in the url), but they also look at who the site is.  If your site looks like you are a guy in his boxers running a website, they are less likely to include you.  They want to see editorial oversight and involvement in your content.  Make sure that you have impressive people associated with who works and publishes on your website.

The CTA may negatively impact you, but you have to step back and say, does your site look like a news site and see how the CTA fits into all of that.

Generally speaking, if you transition it correctly, have the exact same site up and running on the new IP before you change the DNS you should be fine.  I did some Googling on the subject, and Mark D. has a much more specific and detailed description of what you should do as far as making sure you have the exact same site running

http://malteseo.com/seo/changing-ip-address-without-losing-google-ranking/

What you do not want to do at this point is change up your URL structure, title tags etc.  Those changes alone can impact your rankings and you don't want to compound the issues.  Less change, more gradual change is always better.

The answer is yes, this could negatively impact you.  You need to reach out to those sites and email them to get removal.  Document everything that you do.   Then you can then use the disavow tool to tell Google to ignore.    You can also Google link removal software to get help in the first part of the project.

You can also setup Google Webmaster Tools as they give you a report as well to show duplicate titles and metatags.  We use both GWT and SEOMoz in addition to other spider software.

If Hubspot is preventing the redirects then that is your issue.  Google ranked (and sends traffic to) the Hubspot pages.  Unless you can setup the 301s from the old site to the new one, your new site will just look like duplicates of the old one.

Another option to see if you cannot get the 301s to work is to setup canonical links from the old content to the new.  Google most often treats this like a 301.    This could be a good interim step before getting 301s setup.   If Google updates with the new URLs in the SERPs and if you can get most of any external links pointing from the old blog to the new blog, you could then simply shut down the old block.  The canonical link would have updated the SERPs and the external links to the old blog have been updated to the new one.  Therefore, your old blog posts would not have any value to you (as they are not ranked in Google and have little or no links to them) and it would be ok to terminate.

Good luck!

Thanks SEO 5 Team.

Dan, re-read the Google News spec and ultimately you have to make the call.  I dont think blocking the Google News spider will matter much.  Normally, you submit a page or RSS feed or sitemap to direct them to your news content.

Have to reiterate, when you read the guideline, if you feel that you can demonstrate that you are producing high quality journalistic content and that your CTA does not take away from that, then you should be just fine.    Many online publications have ads, it is just that you can tell what is an ad and what is content.  I would use that as your litmus test.

Don't think you are gaming Googlebot.  You are showing it a 404 (that is good) so GB knows that the page is dead.  You are showing a custom page to the user that should let them know the page is dead.  I think the custom page should say something like "Oops, this page no longer exists, redirecting you to another more helpful page in 10 seconds (click here if you are not redirected).  You are

I might give it 15-20 seconds to make sure the person has time to read it.

You are showing the same thing to Gbot and the user, so no cloaking issues, i.e. you are not trying to game GB.

You may want to reconsider a 301 redirect instead.  You then get the redirect automatically for the user (no pause or clicking needed) and the 301 tells google where the new page is etc.   The only caveat to that, if you are redirecting a bunch of pages to the home page (or some other index page)  - your solution above is probably better as you don't want to have a many to one situation with the 301s.  Google prefers more of a one to one on 301 redirects - otherwise they may tag your 301 as a soft 404.

If you read the article I mentioned above, it really does not hide anything from Google, but you are clearly saying that these links are of no value.

I would use the 301 redirect.

In your case, yes that would save a step to just put /ads/ into robots.

I agree with all of the above, just to add another layer, if you take this from a Yelp perspective, they actually specify that you are not supposed to solicit reviews to start with so that the reviews you get are more objective and less biased.

http://www.yelp.com/guidelines

• Don't ask customers for reviews: Don't ask your customers to review your business on Yelp. Over time, solicited reviews create bias in your business listing — a bias that savvy consumers can smell from a mile away. Learn why you shouldn't ask for reviews.

I really like the option that Tim mentioned to put the reviews on your own site and mark up with schema so you get the chance at the rich snippet.  We have seen some nice increases in CTR when we have done this.

I have done it both ways.  The shorter the better, but sometimes you have to make it longer to get the information in.  I like to use at least 1 sub directory to help with organization and this also helps with analytics in organizing how things are reported.  You have to also look at the URL and think - Can I parse this with an analytic tool and get the information I need?

This is where the art comes in with the science.

Good luck!

My two cents, even though Google "generally" sees them the same, I would not allow this to happen so that I can be as specific as possible for Google.

A separate reason to use slashes at the end of the URL is that this is what tools like Google Analytics use to group and sort traffic results.  There are default drill down reports that look at the ending slash to determine traffic to a given directory.   If you are inconsistent with the use of the slash, then you may have some traffic allocated to one directory versus another.

I prefer use of the slash for this reason as well.

Cheers

Add the links if you feel you will get referral business from it, but not for SEO value.  The link(s) you do add, no follow them.   Duane Forrester from Bing stated in a blog post "You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from."

http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2014/05/09/10-seo-myths-reviewed.aspx

This statement was given the general nod by Matt Cutts of Google

https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/466449897261367296

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-advance-links-18549.html

Finally, I would ask, can you do this in a way that is also beneficial to your client?  Is the client getting a discount?  Is there a way you can talk about the services this client provides on your site?  Can the two of you as local businesses provide additional information to your visitors (more than just the link) that could turn visitors into customers?

Good luck!

I would second what Kevin B. stated. Do not ignore the long tail.    That said, we had to put in a lot of work with the production of content to reflect the long tail keywords. You don't want to produce a bunch of spammy junk, but real content pages.

Identifying the keywords is fairly straight forward.  You should be able to look in your Google Analytics reports to get you started.

FYI - the long tail is not just an SEO term/concept.  Chris Anderson over at Wired wrote and article and a book on it.  Interesting read if you want a broader perspective.

http://www.longtail.com/about.html