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Right.  You will not beat the other folks with the subdomain approach.  You are getting beat because your competitors are taking the time to make better content in a niche.  Find a way to get better content on those pages and mark them up with schema to make the info more readable to the search engines and possibly get an enhanced listing the SERPs.

We went through a site relaunch and the review schema on locations got messed up.  Did not impact our rankings, but did impact click through from the search engines.  None of the stars were showing up in the SERPs due to the schema goof up.  Got the schema fixed and traffic was back up.

This link will point you toward the relevant Moz resources

https://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating

If you are happy with my response, please feel free to mark as a "Good Answer" thanks!

Agree with the points above with one exception.   Yes, you have to find a way to deal with duplicate and quality content at scale.  Yes, Robots.txt, nofollow links and index sitemaps are your friends.  I would not use rel=canonical unless I had to.  Better to get those extra pages de-indexed and then not let Google crawl the urls with the extra parameters to start with.  Why waste Google's time in crawling pages that are just resorted versions of another?   If you use the directives wisely you probably "only" have 200,000 pages worth crawling if you have that many sort parameters.

Good luck!

This is similar to the question on if a blog should be on a subdomain (blog.website.com) vs a folder (website.com/blog).

Most people agree that the use of the folder is the better option as with every blog post that you get links to etc, you are building your domain authority and generally speaking, rising tides raise all ships.

You would run into the same issue with your option to setup subdomains for each location.  You would also end up having to deal with separate webmaster accounts for each etc.  I don't think the subdomain is the solution. I run a site with thousands of locations and using a folder structure the business pages rank well for a given location, if you search on the name of the location, so I know it works and I manage it at scale.

I would get back to looking at any technical issues you have and your on page options for the pages.  Anything you can further do to make these pages 10x better than any other page on the net for those locations?

Good luck!

Thanks for the response.  I think we are more in agreement than what you may realize.

Just to be clear.  I was not advocating a back and forth on anything.  Those absolutely lead nowhere. My point is that a well crafted, positive response is usually worth it.  If someone is hell bent on being a jerk back, I think the unreasonable response from the customer further invalidates the negative review to begin with.  Showing that you are professional in dealing with complaints was my point and that professionalism usually wins through in making an impression on other customers.   My "taking it on the chin" is not about letting your company be dragged through mud per se, but showing that you are professional and sensible even when the customer is not.

I would also agree that if you can also contact the customer and resolving the issue directly is always the way to go and we encourage this where possible.  Often that information can be made part of the response.  i.e. "Thank you for your review.  I enjoyed speaking with you on the phone and glad we could resolve this ..."

If you would like some data on how users trust reviews more when they see negative reviews there is a study by Revoo here with the PDF of the Revoo data here.  You can also read some research done by Harris Interactive here.

As with all these things "your mileage may vary".  To that point we did focus groups on the site I work on to see if we would see the same effect of the negative review qualifying the positive review and saw this happening with our demographic.  People were suspicious when it was all positive reviews, but when they would then see a business with a negative review and a well crafted response from the business, they would often respond very favorably to the information.

Thanks!

I would agree with the owner response route.

https://biz.yelp.com/support/responding_to_reviews  (watch the video it is really good and has good tips)

I run a review site and owner responses to negative reviews are some of the best "reviews" on the site.  We have done extensive user testing and we find that people trust the business listing/reviews more and are generally impressed, once they see a negative review (as nobody is perfect) and if the owner response is well crafted. Why?

Not everyone agrees with what is "negative" or "bad".  e.g. Someone might not like that a store closes at 9pm vs 10 pm, others don't care.  Also, people are not stupid and can see when a customer is just being an a$$hole vs having a constructive complaint.

If persons see all positive reviews, they are suspicious as they think the positive reviews are fake.  A negative review can actually legitimize the positive ones.

There is data that I have seen that you can often use a response to a negative review to earn a loyal customer.

Take the time to respond and show that your business owner cares.  Unless they are getting spammed they can turn these lemons into lemonade.  If I see that a business owner is willing to apologise and offer whatever they can do to make it right in a public forum like Yelp, I like that.  I know people have bad days and I know customers can be crazy.  When an owner will take one on the chin (even if they are not in the wrong) that is who I want to deal with.  This type of approach that places like Nordstroms uses and it works pretty well.

The other route is to look and see if the review violates Yelps content guidelines

http://www.yelp.com/guidelines

If the review violates any of these terms, you have a stronger case for having them removed.

I would say make sure that your new sitemap has all the latest URLs.  The reason people say that you should have old URLs in the sitemap is so that Google can quickly crawl the old URLs to find the 301s to the new URLs.

I am not convinced that this helps.  Why?

Google already has all your old URLs in its systems.  You would be shocked how far back Google has data on your site with old URLs.  I have a site that is over 10 years old and I still see URL structures referenced in Google from 7 years ago that have a 301 in place.  Why is this?

Google will assume that, "Well, I know that this URL is a 301 or 404, but I am going to crawl it every once in a while just to make sure the webmaster did not do this by mistake."   You can notice this in Search Console error or link reports when you setup 301s or 404s, they may stay in there for months and even come back once they fall out of the error list.  I had an occurrence where I had some old URLs showing up in the SERPs and various Search Console reports for a site for 2 years following proper 301 setups.  Why was this happening?

This is a large site and we still had some old content still linking to the old URLs.  The solution was to delete the links in that old content and setup a canonical to self on all the pages to help give a definitive directive to Google.  Google then finally replaced the old URLs with the new URLs in the SERPs and in the Search Console reports.  The point here being that previously our site was giving signals (links) that told Google that some of the old URLs were still valid and Google was giving us the benefit of the doubt.

If you want to have the new URLs seen by Google, show them in your sitemap.   Google already has all the old URLs and will check them and find the 301s and fix everything.  I would also recommend the canonical to self on the new pages.  Don't give any signals to Google that your old URLs are still valid by linking to them in any way, especially your sitemap.  I would even go so far as to reach out to any important sites that link to old URLs to ask for an updated link to your site.

As I mentioned above, I do not think there is an "advantage" of getting the new URLs indexed quicker by putting old URLs in the sitemap that 301 to the new URLs.  Just watch your Google Search Console crawl stats.  Once you do a major overhaul, you will see Google really crawl your site like crazy and they will update things pretty quick.   Putting the old URLs in the sitemap is a conflicting signal in that process and has the potential to slow Google down IMHO.

Just to clarify above and add a little bit.

The Disavow file to Google only goes to Google.  Even when you submit it there, and Google confirms that it has the new copy, it takes a while (several months) for Google to then account for the domains you are Disavowing. i.e. Don't expect an immediate effect from Google in what you see in Search Console and/or in the SERPs.  Also, side note, you should generally disavow at the domain level as once you have a bad link from a site, the whole site is probably not worth it and it makes your job easier if there are a bunch of links from the same domain.  Also, spammers will use a subdomains to create copies of the main site and add even more crappy links to your site.  Disavowing the domain takes care of the subdomain as well. The exception to this would be sites that are on wordpress, as all the subdomains would really be from different sites (you get the idea) so you would disavow at the subdomain level for those sites.

I have one site I run that gets a bunch of spam links to us built and so 1x to 2x a year I have to pull everything I can get from Moz, Majestic, Search Console, etc and find new domains to add to the Disavow file.  It sucks, but it helps even though Google's official line that they can account for negative SEO.

There are tools such as CognitiveSEO that will aggregate links for you from various sources and then you can upload your Disavow file there and it will then know to filter out all the links it finds from those domains to help you weed out what you need to audit and I have found this useful.

Continuing from previous answers, Moz has no idea what the disavow file you sent to Google contains and will not take that into account when it is looking for links.  You may see more links from the disavowed domains show up in Moz because of that.  This is where tools like CognitiveSEO are helpful in being able to sort out things.  I would hope that for MozPro members this would be a feature to add so that your OSE profile could account for Disavowed links.  I have found Moz helpful in using the Spam score to decide if I should disavow domains for Google.

Regarding your point about finding links to your sites and then the sites no longer exist.  That happens.  The Moz link database and also Google's databases are not updated in real time.  I have also seen that the links in Search Console are not up to date with what I see in Google search.  If you go to the sites and they are 404/410 Gone, you are probably fine.  I would say the disavow is a good conservative way to make sure that you are "safe" and would recommend that you move forward with that.   If the sites are gone (as mentioned above) Moz should show them gone in the next update or two (depending on if they crawled those sites or not).

Bottom line on all this is, are you seeing less organic traffic to your site?  All of the above may be a moo point if the bad sites that link to you are dead and potentially even Google is already ignoring them (and the disavow will make sure of that).  Google does not look at the Moz metrics and so it does not matter if the links are included in the Moz index as long as you know they are taken care of.  If your organic traffic is ok, then enjoy that coffee and relax as you submit the disavow file.

Cheers!

I agree with Alan's points.  I have also found WebSiteTest.com really useful.  It allows for multiple runs on multiple devices and you can download the results in CSV.  Expanding on Alan's point around looking at bottleneck points, when you use these tools, you need to take time to understand the waterfall chart as that is where you can see how the browsers interact with all of these files (html, css, js, images etc).

I have been doing a ton of reading on front end optimization recently.  Aside from all of the above, you could have issue with the critical rendering path (great resources here and here).  Many times folks look at a single asset and say, "This javascript file is too big, lets minify it and get faster!"  That is a good thing and will help you.  That said, you have to look at the render path as you may have that same smaller JS file blocking other downloads that need to be downloaded first to render the page faster.  Optimizing the render path can give you some additional gains.

Good luck!

Couple of thing as one who deals with 1,000+ 404s in Google Search Console at any one time and also dealt with leaky CMS systems.

A) Dealing with 404s in Google search console

1. Small thing, if these pages are gone and 404 and will not come back, consider showing a 410 (permanent gone) vs a 404, but either will work.

2. Make sure you have a useful 404 page when people land there so that they can go somewhere else if they need.

3. VERY IMPORTANT - DO NOT mark a 404 as "fixed" in Google Search Console, if the page is supposed to 404.

Why?  Because if the 404 is fixed, then Google will expect to see a 200/ok response!   It will then say, "Oh, the webmaster said this was fixed, but I still see the 404 so I will put it back in the 404 report to help this webmaster."  You will then see the 404 show back up in your console after you removed it and then you start that weird eye twitch that you get when you start to stress.  In fact, I have found if I ever marked a page that is supposed to 404 as "fixed" it takes it that much longer to get out of the 404 report.

What search console needs is a way to mark a 404 in the crawl report and say, "Yep, I see it and it is supposed to 404" in addition to the "Fixed" option.

Rule of thumb, if the page is supposed to 404 let it 404 and just ignore it in the crawl errors of Google webmaster tools / search console.  You do not need to "fix" anything.  The 404s will drop out after about 3 months.  I just check the 404s and then sort by date to see the newest.  If they are supposed to 404 (see point below) I leave them alone and don't stress.

All the other stuff about removing URLs is usually a waste of time.  Just let Google do its work.

If you don't believe me, just ask Google

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html  "If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results."

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-404-20738.html "Google's Gary Illyes responded in short to a Google Panda question, asking if having 404ed pages have an impact on the overall Google Panda algorithm. Gary said on Twitter, "nope," it does not.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en  Google's webmaster docs _"_Generally, 404 errors don’t impact your site’s ranking in Google, and you can safely ignore them."

All of the above assumes that these are pages that are supposed to 404.  In other words, they are pages that you did not try to use for ranking, etc.  If these were important pages, like home pages or landing pages, then sure a 404 is bad it would negatively impact ranking of those pages. Good pages you want to fix, yes.  Bad pages, just let them die and remove links to them as well for a good user experience.

B) Dealing with leaky CMS systems

I know this may not be your case right now, but it seems to have been before and so wanted to toss this out there as well.  Somewhere, there is (or was) a link to these drafts you mention that are out in the public.  You need to search Google, look through Moz or Majestic or use Screaming Frog to find how these drafts got linked to.   If you look in search console, you should be able to click the 404 errors and see where they are linked from as a clue.

Until you fix the leak, you will end up with wet shoes every time.  Here is an example of where a person was using custom code to display posts, and the code was showing draft posts by accident: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/draft-posts-showing-up-in-recent-posts-feed

Hope this helps!

In my head, good UX results in good SEO.  I think you need more copy for the user to talk about all of your great Houston SEO experiences, but that will also give more fodder for the bots to read and traverse.

Other things that come to my mind.  Google search console is looking at your entire site.   On your site as a whole, the word "houston" is mentioned a lot and the word "seo" is mentioned a lot and probably "houston SEO" happens a fair amount. But if that is the case, out of all the pages on your site, which one should Google rank for "Houston SEO"?  What signals are you giving that are clear to the point of whacking a 2x4 over the head that "this" is the most important page on your site that relates to that key term.  You may need to look at how you use keywords across the site.  You may want to look at how you link internally and on what anchor text you use internally.

I know this is not the same example, but what comes to my mind is this WBF

https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday

Rand states that if you really want to rank a page on something, your content has to be 10x better than everyone else's. It has to be that good to stand out to Google and users to rank in the SERPs.

Is your SEO houston page content 10x better compared to all the other pages on your site (and to your competitors' sites) as it relates to Houston SEO?  The suggestions I gave on how to add more content related to Houston SEO to a specific page underscore that idea and in the process, it also adds some additional keywords on the page without it looking too spammy.  Good for users good for Google.

The other aspect that not a lot of people talk about is how making the page "sticky" aka making it really useful, helps with SEO.  Google tracks people clicking on a result and then coming back to the SERPS with the idea that if you stay longer on a page then it must be "better" and it helps with the rankings.  (This is also why making sure your meta description is on point for conversion as you have to get people to click that result if you ever want a change to have them get to your site and stay a while).  Adding all that additional "houston SEO" content on a page will hopefully cause the user to stay longer and improve your quality score with Google from the standpoint that Google should see people spending more time on your site before or if they click back.  This is also why using bulleted lists and short paragraphs work.  People skim.  If they see a bunch of long text, they will leave quick as they do not want to process that info.  Lists, bullet points, bolded highlights, pictures, I will hang around and glance through that for sure!  

Moz blog post and video on pogo sticking.

This make me think of a picture of a snake eating its own tail.

You buy a domain and build all this great content and then get links to that content, then you sell the domain but take all the content.  You just took away the think that built all the traffic and links, i.e. made the domain valuable.  If you still own all the content, sure you can put it on a new domain but you are basically starting over in building links to the content as all the previous links went to the old domain.  It is kind of a lose/lose situation here for both parties, unless you do not mind building from scratch.

If you are going through with this you need to do the following.

1. Make sure that the new owner of the domain you just sold has agreed to not republish your content.  Otherwise they have the upper hand and when you republish, Google will think your stuff is duplicate.

2. I agree with Kate, if you can, go ahead and 410 the content now on the domain you sold (but I assume still control) and request removal of it all through Search Console.  Yes, this will make the new domain less valuable for the new owner, but you are already going to do that by taking all the content.

Good luck!

External style sheets are pretty much standard these days on web pages.  If you view source on any reputable site, you will see a reference to an external CSS in addition to references to various JS files etc.  This techniques also enables the CSS to be cached and re-used as persons go through your site.  Faster sites make for happier users make for better rankings.

Agree with Lesley.  1300 is excessive, and even 50 sounds like a lot to me.  Do you see any in Search Console?  Would be interesting to see if this were corroborated by Google seeing similar.

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!

I would check your title tags.

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.

Great input by Ken, wanted to embellish.  301 redirects are key (talk with your developer or host on best way with your setup on how to implement)  Google Search Console actually has a "change of address" option to help you migrate.  There is also a step by step tutorial  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?hl=en

Good luck!

You bet!  If you don't mind, please mark this as a good answer then.

Cheers!

When the server 301 redirects a page, the page that used to have the canonical link on it ceases to exist.  The server simply routes the user to the new page without ever showing the old one.

What they are talking about in the chain situation above applies to rel=canonicals and 301s regardless and has nothing to do with your point about removing the rel=canonical off the page before you 301.  It is completely different.

Ideally you would not want to not rel=canonical  page1 to page2 and then rel=canonical page2 to page3, it would be better to rel=canonical page1 to page3 (go direct avoid the chain).

in the same way you would not want to 301 redirect page1 to page2 and then 301 redirect page2 to page3, it would be better to 301 redirect page1 to page3 (go direct avoid the chain).

in the same way you would not want to  rel=canonical page1 to page2 and then 301 redirect page2 to page3, it would be better to 301 redirect page1 to page3 (go direct avoid the chain).