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Great answer!

You need to create other social profiles or websites that talk about Blatt Financial group and get them to rank above the page in question.   You essentially need to crowd them out as your main option.

Thanks!  If you would please mark as a good answer!

I guess I would have to see the site and the tool to understand your point as it does not make sense if you would make a tool that is unrelated to your core business as that would take away from your core business structure.

I would do some testing with some of your users / audience to see what they think.  It may or may not be jarring to them and could help you with your answer in what direction on where to go.

This is similar to the question, blog on a different subdomain vs a folder.  Most SEOs would agree that putting a blog in a folder is better as any links to the blog builds the domain authority of the entire domain.  Rising tides raises all ships.

Likewise, I think it is telling that Moz rolled OSE under the main moz.com domain.  Why? I would guess (Disclaimer: this is just my guess as I do not speak for Moz) for the same reason of consolidating domain authority, but also I think it makes sense from a branding perspective.   Why would you want to spend all this time creating a tool and getting people to remember another domain name when you could be piggybacking off the fact that they already know your domain name to start with and so with any press around the new tool your main domain name is being talked about (let alone linked to).

I think in most cases a separate domain or subdomain is at the suggestion of developers to make it easier to develop on a separate server etc.  That is technical hurdle that should not drive the answer of what is best for your users and for branding.

One domain name is hard enough to remember, why make people remember another one?  Keep it simple. Reduce cognitive load.    Plus, if the new tool goes viral and is on your main domain, your main domain is going viral as well.

Unless you are trying to build a separate company with a separate brand, then you might go the separate domain route.

The page you mention

http://www.tripcentral.ca/vacations-packages_mexico.html

is about Vacation Packages to Mexico.  That is the "product" you are selling and aggregating ratings on them on the page and then marking them up with schema.

You then have the item reviewed as "Mexico"

But if you look at all the individual ratings they really all for different resorts in Mexico and not single specific Mexico vacation package.  Example from your page

review [Review]:

name:Riu Santa Fe - Great Resort

datePublished: 2015-09-06

reviewBody:

Very clean resort, nice rooms food was ok a lot to choose from. Barbq by the pool was excellent. Great entertainment staff. Spent most of our time at infinity pool. Staff does an excellent job shutting down party pools early to get drunks out and back to room. They are also quick in stopping rowdiness late at night. Would go back again. Sunwing very comfortable flight and champagne toast was a bonus you don't get anywhere else.Google is normally looking for the aggregated review rating to be of a single product or location.  i.e. if you had an aggregate rating of the Riu Santa Fe resort and then all the reviews were of that hotel/resort it would all tie out as far as Google and schema is concerned.What is probably happening is that when you have only a single review, Google is seeing that as the single review for that hotel and so you are ok, and the stars show up in the SERPS.  Then you start to add the other reviews related to other hotels/resorts, your stars get dropped as you are now mixing up reviews of different locations/things and Google does not like that.I have as a general rule that when I aggregate ratings like you are doing, I show the aggregated review results to the user as it may be helpfil, but I do not mark that up in schema as that is not what the schema was intended for.https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviewsReview and rating markup should be used to provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items. For example, “hotels in Madrid”, “summer dresses”, or “cake recipes” are not specific items. See also our structured data policies for multiple entities on the same page.Good luck!

Well, you are on the right path with thinking on how to reduce the amount of unneeded pages.

Here is how I would approach it.

1. Check the query volume levels on those specific queries "Map to XXX"

2. Check the search volume on those pages.

See if you can detect a pattern that there is search volume to justify those searches, do they result in significant traffic to those pages.  Then try and determine, what is the content on all those separate pages and is it any good?  Are they making extra pages to make extra pages?  Sure, in theory you could do a page per query, but I would bet if they have a ton of hotel, all the info on those pages is a bunch of boilerplate crap copied from somewhere else.  Even if the search volume was there, do they have a good enough page with good content to rank for it?

Now that we have hummingbird type algos in Google, it reduces the need to get so specific for matching on queries on a page by page basis.  Build a single, awesome, page that is really helpful to users and has original content, that is how you win for the big queries and then fill in for the rest. You can then use the title, description and H1, H2 headings to show the important information.

Remember that the rel=canonical will help Google understand what your main page is and what your secondary/duplicate pages are in this specific case, but I am not sure that Google would see it as the consolidated awesome single page.

Rel=canonical is more for showing how the parts are just parts of a whole page that is already there, it is more to help clean up duplicate content

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

As I read your post originally, this seemed to be more of the issue.  This was why I was encouraging you to take the content in the tab (that did not seem substantial) and put it on the main page and use the canonical or if the content was junk then it did not matter as much.

Hope that makes sense.

Google and Bing have this option in PPC and can focus in a given region

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2580282?hl=en

http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/cl/245/training/bing-ads-targeting

Something else you need to consider is verifying the age of the customer to his website.  One of the sites I help run caters items to a older demographic.  I know from industry data that the average user generally speaking is 65-75 years old.  When I look at the website data coming though in Google Analytics or when we have conducted online surveys we normally see the age range being younger.   It makes sense when you look at the online useage patterns of the age of customer that we target.

If your customer is assuming an age range based on external data, that is always a good start, but you will need to look at his/her site users directly.  You can do this apriori once you start up the campaigns to see what works the best, but doing a little more up front work may help you get to the target more quickly.

Good luck!

The rel=canonical is what you need to do right now to help fix this.  Google has already indexed all of those tabbed pages and you need to make sure that Google knows that they are subsections of the main page and how it all fits together.  The canonical is treated like a 301 redirect.  Doing that should take care of the extra pages indexed.  If you can 301 those tabbed pages that would be a good option as well, not a good option if you do not want to lose the content on those tabbed pages though.

Right now, I would not use no-follow on links or no-index meta tags on the tabbed pages. If you use no-follow, you are telling Google to not follow that tab link and so it is not able to crawl over the the tabbed page and see the canonical link.  Second, if you have a noindex meta on that tabbed page, it tells Google to take the page out of the index and would probably conflict with the canonical link as well.

The only way you would want to use no-follow or noindex meta tags or blocking in robots.txt is if 1) the content is not worth indexing and/or ranking and or 2) it is not in the index already and you want to keep Google out of this stuff.

Ultimately, I would try and get the stuff on the tabbed sections onto the main page and then use the noindex meta tag on the tabbed pages so that you can get rid of the tabbed pages all together and not work about losing the content that is in the tabbed section.  If you can do that, it would be a better approach than the canonical option, but it looks like you may not have that option at this time.  All those extra tab pages are just wasting Google's time crawling pages that do not matter (most likely).

If you did not care about the content on the tabbed pages, I would just 410 them right now and get rid of the links to the tabs on the main pages.

Hope the above makes sense, tried to answer the "it depends" scenarios.

Feel free to ignore this next part, but I have a separate question if you drop the whole tab pages issue and look at this at a higher level.  Looking at this subsection of URLs from above

• hotel-downtown-calgary
• hotel-downtown-calgary/gallery
• hotel-downtown-calgary/map
• hotel-downtown-calgary/facilities
• hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews
• hotel-downtown-calgary/in-the-area

Would not all the above pages really need to be about a single hotel or a category page on all the hotels in downtown calgary? Unless you have enough search query volume to support a separate page for each of them, seems like if you put the content on all the pages listed above into a single page, you would have a really awesome page about either a specific downtown calgary hotel or all the hotels in downtown calgary.

Moz toolbar.  See top left.

Screenshot before toolbar is set to highlight no follows

http://i.imgur.com/05p5h0T.png

Screenshot after after toolbar is set to highlight no follows

http://i.imgur.com/YSGw1gK.png

Example of toolbar highlighting no follows

http://i.imgur.com/Xy4iL9i.png

Other resources to learn more about Moz bar

https://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/mozbar

https://moz.com/blog/announcing-mozbar-v3

http://www.poweredbysearch.com/mozbar-seo-extension-chrome-firefox/

or you can Google "Moz bar guide"

https://www.google.com/search?q=mozbar+guide

Search console is link agnostic.

https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--webmaster-tools

Q: I know I have [one / several / dozens of ] links that Search Console isn't showing. What gives?
A: Although the link reports in Search Console are more comprehensive than doing a [link:example.com] query in Google search, they may not include 100% of all links that you know about. This is normal and should not be cause for alarm. Search Console does not always show 100% of the links that Google knows about, so just because a particular link doesn't appear in Search Console doesn't mean that Google doesn't know about that link, or that your site isn't "getting credit" for that link.

Note that the link report in Search Console only shows whether a site is linking to yours; it doesn't show which links are most significant, and it can include links that are nofollowed, disavowed, or that don't pass PageRank.

Moz toolbar will do it.

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.

That would be best practice and the conservative approach to tell clients to no follow any banner ads pointing to the site.  If you call yourself a white hat seo that follows Google guidelines, then that is your route.  Not all SEOs are of this ilk, so what others do is up to them.

I would not expect that a publisher know to add a no follow.  They are not focused on SEO, they are just focused on selling banners.  As you are paying them for the banner, they should be able to accommodate this.

If they were not, you can have them direct the banner to a page on your site that is blocked via robots.txt and then (if needed) 301 redirect the page to the page that you want the user to see.

Agree 100%.

I agree with Moosa, but would add another layer of analysis on this.  You need to do a type of content audit on these pages.   You can go into GA to just look at traffic or use a tool (my new favorite) called URL Profiler to pull GA and OSE and Majestic link data plus social media shares on your sold product URLs.

For each sold product page you have two options:

1. 301 the page - If the "sold' page generates a fair amount of traffic, and even has some links coming in, you probably want to 301 redirect it.  The 301 needs to be to a page with similar semantic information.  Ideally this would be a main product category page so you can build the traffic to that page.

Example: If you sell Ford Mustangs and you have a lot of "sold" pages of Ford Mustangs, and those sold pages still get traffic and even have some links to them, you want to 301 those pages to your main category Ford Mustang page that has links to all of your Ford Mustangs that are still for sale.  Good for Google, good for the user.  Key point is that a) the "sold" pages are still generating value (traffic and links) and b) that you redirect to a semantically related page.  If you use a 301 to redirect to the home page that is a bad idea as it needs to be closely related in topic.   When looking at a "Ford Mustang for sale" page, a multiple car brands for sale page (your home page theme) is not as closely related to it as your main Ford Mustangs for sale category page.   It would also behoove you to really make that Ford Mustang for sale category page really kick a$$ content wise.

2. 410/404 the page - If you find a large group of "sold" pages that do not get very much traffic to them and/or they do not have much link equity, just let them 404/410.  Show a helpful not found page with links to other sections of your site and even a search function.   FYI - I like the 410 directive as it is a "permanently gone" directive vs a temporary one.

How do you get the data I am talking about on all the "sold" pages?  Using a tool like URL profiler, you put in all of your "sold" URLs and the software uses an API to get data from Search Console, GA, OSE and Majestic (among other tools) and pulls them into a single line per sheet.  You can then look for each URL any of the data and determine if you use option #1 or option #2.   Moz has an article on how to do a content audit you can search the web for other examples.  A simpler version of this would be to use the advanced search within GA and pull the organic landing page traffic on those pages.

Some SEOs would say that option #2 is blasphemy. ie. you always want to 301 redirect.  Why would you ever want to lose traffic by setting up a 410?  That will cause errors to show up in Search Console!  You will lose link equity and traffic!

This is why you have to perform the content audit.   If you have 1,000 pages but 800 of them send next to no traffic to your site and have generated 2 links, you can 410 the 800 pages and never notice the difference. You will not miss the traffic or links as they had none to begin with!   All those 800 pages are doing is wasting your crawl budget with Google and giving a signal to Google that you have a bunch of low quality pages on your website.  Also, don't panic when you see all the 410 in Search Console.  Just sort by date and then by priority to make sure that these are all the pages that you want to 410.  Over time (about 3-4 months) they will naturally fall out.

Yes this is an issue.  All pages in pagination using rel next prev need unique titles (just like all pages on your site need unique titles).  I usually accomplish this with each title being something like

Website Name Article Archives - Page $

or

Shoe Inventory - Page $

Where $ is whatever page of the pagination the person is on.

If you do have duplicate titles due to pagination (or otherwise), then you will start to see this show up as errors in your Search Console reports.

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 would find a solution to use a popup or slide out or whatever that is hosted on your own server. That way you do not have an external call to another website that could potentially slow down the rendering of your web page and therefore negatively impact your organic SEO.

Just like you want to have a single title tag you want to optimally have a single H1.  Use of the H1 (and H2 H3s for that matter) helps Google to understand the hierarchy of information on your page.  By having multiple H1s you are potentially not giving as clear of a signal of what text is most important on your page.  It is also good for users as they can clearly and quickly see what your page is about and increase the chances of staying on your page, thereby reducing bounce rate and potentially increasing conversion rate.

That said, regarding rankings, this all depends.  I can't promise that if you fix your H1 that you will rank #1 - there are just too many other factors to consider.  Can you rank well with having multiple H1s, sure.  Google still may be able to "figure it out".

Still, best practice is to have a single H1 as far as what most SEOs (and SEOs that I respect) recommend and this is what I do on all of my sites.

Some other posts on this topic that are of this ilk:

https://moz.com/community/q/h1-tag

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/in-2014-how-important-is-an-h1-tag-for-seo/

https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-peroperly-use-h1-h2-and-h3-tag-on-your-website

http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/heading-elements-and-the-folly-of-seo-expert-ranking-lists/

Found this while looking for a answer for another question could not find this the other day- right from the mouth of Google to not include pages that do not exist in XML sitemaps.

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.