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Thank you very much Miriam. Very helpful.

I've now got on and followed those steps you advised and am waiting for Google to fix the issue. To update this thread this is the email I received from Google as their initial response:

_Thank you for contacting Google. __We may follow up if we need further information. Also, feel free to respond to this email to clarify anything or give us additional information. _Otherwise, we appreciate your patience while our team reviews and responds to inquiries in the order they are received. _Once we're finished investigating, someone from our team will get back to you with actions we've taken and instructions for next steps. __Regards, _The Google Places Team

I will update further when I have heard back.

Thanks again,
Peter

Sorry Doug, I had assumed Google Places / Google+ Local had not been set up.

I understand more now. I think it is a tricky one as without a certified address I think it's difficult to optimise web pages.  I agree, the wider the area the less specific/relevant it's going to be,

I think your strategy to set up specific landing pages for an area where the trades person works in and can publish testimonials relevant to that location is an excellent one. If they are a builder or decorator for example, then if their customer is willing, then it would be good to include a case study of the work done along with before/after photos with alt tags optimised to include the location.

There's a lady on Moz called Miriam Ellis who is really knowledgeable on Local SEO. Hopefully, she will pick up and be able to comment on this thread and give some direction. Meantime, in case you haven't seen it, she wrote a very helpful blog post: Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors: An Illustrated Guide.

I hope that helps a little further,
Peter

Hi Gavo, yes they will to an extent because some of the link value passed to your home page will be shared through the internal links you have on your home page (e.g. via menu navigation) to other pages on your site.

A word of caution though, which you may already be aware of, to be careful when gathering links to your site that they are from good quality sites with relevance to your site. Directory sites and blogs can be prone to being 'thin' in quality and can, if they themselves are seen as spammy sites, not help your site if you are receiving links from them.

I hope that helps,

Peter

Hi Doug, one aspect you haven't mentioned which I have found still works for a service business covering an area is to use Google Places.

Providing the business has a physical address at the centre of their 'patch' so to speak then that's a marker on the map from which the service operates in a radius.

In terms of landing pages on the site then yes do that with a clear reference to the town/city address and phone number (which will be certified by the office's corresponding Google Places page) and include on that page a list of areas covered which are geographically associated with the office location.

Peter

That's an interesting thought Luke. Yes, I agree something like that would work much better. I think a group like that would need some strong affiliations with already recognised online groups of like-minded SEO people (like on Moz) to give it gravity and value, but it could work. I don't know if such a group exists.

Peter

An interesting thought but I'm not sure the industry should be regulated.

My experience when governments get involved is that they then start implementing laws and rules without really understanding the industry. This happened around 18 months ago when the EU implemented the 'cookie law', a rule to outlaw bad practice that made it harder for sites to make their pages easy to navigate and engage with and harder for users to browse the web.

In a sense, the changes Google has made to its algorithms over time have acted as a regulator. If you don't follow good practice then you will end up losing. There's lots of companies out there not just in the SEO world delivering poor, unregulated service. But SEO agencies who continue with bad practice will soon lose reputation and go out of business.

Anyway, all the best to you,
Peter

Hi Luke

To include the suggestion on searchenginewatch.com in this conversation, it said:

Submit an updated sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and use the change of address function if moving to a new domain. Remember to initially keep the old URLs in your XML sitemap to facilitate Google crawling those links and processing the changes in their index.

Well it would be interesting to hear others feedback on that. Personally, I think having old URLs in a sitemap (that without a redirect would result in a page not found 404 error) doesn't seem correct to me.

Presumably, you have had the URL in the sitemap previously when the page at the URL was active. But then, by setting up a 301 redirect, you are telling Google that the page at the URL that Google has in its index has now permanently moved to a new URL.

When you submit a sitemap to Google then you are submitting a list of all the URLs on your site that you are asking Google to crawl. But to include the old URL in your sitemap along with the new URL is essentially asking Google to crawl two URLs pointing to the same page.

I'm not sure Google would necessarily consider that to be a canonical issue (because the old URL is now not current) but for me it's a misuse of the sitemap.

But as I say, it would be interesting to hear others feedback on this.

Peter

Yes, very odd that an SEO agency should do this.

It's a dumb tactic, but I doubt it would confer a penalty. More like downgrade the quality of the page and cause it to drop but I would be surprised if this alone would be responsible for the site you mention to suffer a dramatic fall in traffic.

If, as you say, the SEO agency was responsible for doing this, then it's likely that the same agency would have also been responsible for other dumb to verging on spammy tactics on this site with the cumulative result being a significant drop.

Peter

Yes I agree with Chris. There are thousands of sites with duplicate page Titles. They would be typically be sites which have not been optimised at all where the company service and company name are duplicated on every page as a default setting.

I doubt whether Google pays attention to that in terms of the site trying to manipulate search results. If anything they are undermining the search performance of their site themselves by making it harder for search engines to understand the focus of each page. That an SEO company advised them to do this is the most surprising.

Peter

Hi Luke

My advice would be that you submit one the sitemap containing the new URLs. The new sitemap should contain the new URLs and replace the old sitemap.

The 301 redirects are for the purpose of redirecting outdated links and search engine indexes to the new 301 (permanent) URLs and should remain in place even when search engines have updated their indexes so that they always redirect any outdated backlinks.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi, there are lots of experts you could call on to help you.

I don't represent Moz, but speaking independently my best advice for a pool of companies you could contact would be to look at the Moz recommended list of companies and speak to some of them. You can see the list here: http://moz.com/community/recommended

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi

Effective backlinks to a page are essentially votes of approval for that web page. If the pages you are trying to rank have poor/basic content then you are really going to struggle.

Gone are the days when you can just create backlinks all over from anywhere to point to your pages and give your site a boost in the rankings. With Google's latest updates to their algorithms and the advent of Penguin and Panda in the last couple of years, building backlinks from thin sites or to thin sites is not going to work and is likely to get your site penalised.

My advice would be to go back to your clients with citations from SEO experts that underline the issue they will have if they don't improve their sites with good quality content that engages with the people who would be looking for it. I'm sorry to say this, but the reality of this is that if they continue to ignore how SEO works and advice you have given them then they will continue to lose online.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi, sorry to hear you are having a problem with this.

It's an issue that others in the Moz Q&A forum have reported in the last day or so. From the report on http://health.moz.com/ it suggests that it's an issue that Moz's engineers are aware of and are looking to resolve:

Cannot add Google+ accounts
Our engineers are working to resolve an issue preventing Google+ accounts from being added in campaign settings. An update is expected later today so please check back for any new status! Common errors are returning: remote-authentication.failure.

I hope that helps. Just keep an eye on http://health.moz.com/ for an update.

Peter

Do you mean in your Moz profile page or in Moz Analytics?

Peter

HI, yes you should be able to do this. Have you tried entering the ID or the Google+ name if you have one of the new vanity URLs for your business page?

Peter

Hi Shaun

I would definitely recommend a flat structure as you have suggested.

Your CMS (Wordpress?) may crete category / tag links but whilst they are useful for human visitors to browse blog posts around a subject, they are not great for search engines, so set them if possible as nofollow links.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Laura

You can do a search of Google's index for a site by doing the following:

site:electric-heatingsupplies.co.uk

but that won't tell you which URLs have redirections on them. However by clicking each link you will at least see if they are going to the correct page or a page not found (404) error.

Peter

Hi, yes, you just need to run the query against Twitter's own search tool which you can type in on their site or by creating a URL to do the following example which is for the bbc.co.uk URL.

https://twitter.com/search?q=bbc.co.uk

Peter

For Twitter you could use retweetrank. So for example: http://www.retweetrank.com/randfish/

I'm not sure you can do the same with Facebook or ther other social networks.

Peter

Hi, if the syntax of the code in your text file is correct, then it should just be a case of changing the file suffix from .txt to .xml.

You shouldn't need to open it in any editor, just rename it. If you need to open it though then don't use MS Word as that is really a rich text editor. Either use Notepad on a PC or TextEdit on a Mac

An XML file is a simple text file, but the syntax needs to be correct.

Peter