Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, I think without a dealer in San Francisco with a physical address then you need to optimise the page on your site for the dealer you have in Santa Rosa complete with citations for their location (Name, Address, Phone number).

The success of the Santa Rosa dealer's page for searches for San Francisco will largely depend on the competitiveness of other dealers listed on the Internet that are selling the same products with local citations closer to San Francisco. If there are limited dealers to be found for San Francisco then Google will spread it's net wider to find other relevant results. That said, your Google+ Local listing showing coverage should help your site page.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Muhammad

Your link building and SEO strategies to a large extent should be no different than before Hummingbird. To qualify that I would say that is true if before Hummingbird you were already creating content that focussed on answering the needs of people for questions they were asking and information they were looking for.

I would recommend you read a recent blog post on Moz by Gianluca Fiorelli about Hummingbird entitled "Hummingbird Unleashed" in which Gianluca very much explains what has changed and what those concerned with marketing online should be doing about it. For me the quote I found to be very helpful was "We should stop focusing only on keyword optimization and start thinking about topical optimization" and that I think at the heart of the Hummingbird update.

With regard to link building, your strategy (which hopefully it was before) should be to make sure that links are built from other sites and pages that are relevant to the topic of your site and pages. Gone are the days when any backlink was good and the more inbound links you could build the better. A lot of site's ranked well using that strategy, but one by one those sites are falling by the wayside.

So set a foundation to build topical content that people want to read and share and you will be heading in the right direction.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Mark

I agree with both Chris & Ratan. Based on Rand's recent Whiteboard Friday there is also a case of saying Google+ is best for SEO - some interesting thoughts on there so worth watching.

Peter

Hi, it should work but maybe you are not adding it correctly? You just need to put in your new Google+ name with a plus sign before it, e.g. +PeterLunn without any other parts of the URL.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Mozcast also record a spike in the Google weather between 1st and 3rd November, but there were bigger rises between 23rd and 28th October showing more changes went on during that period.

http://mozcast.com/

Peter

Hi,

If I am really honest I wouldn't vote for any of them, mainly because I think there's too many words and they all feel pretty complicated.

Maybe I don't understand your market (which is very possible!) but does anyone search for "authentic designer vintage bags"? However, I can understand someone searching possibly for "vintage designer bags".

I think for your URLs to be useful for search engines and humans alike, then simpler is better. So, I would suggest something like "/designer-bags/vintage-clutch".

A thought regarding the surplus "product-category" part of the URL you should be able to rewrite that out with a line of code in your site's .htaccess file - if you have the option to modify it.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Papp

What is the best keyword research software without monthly payments from those you have outlined?

Well Long Tail Pro has a monthly subscription so that doesn't fit, but the other two may do. But on what criteria can you judge what is the best?

Tools that scrape Google Suggest like the one you linked to can be useful and produce interesting results, but that isn't the whole story for keyword research. What about search volumes for the suggested keywords? And also the difficulty of ranking for them? Without volume and competitor metrics to go with your keyword research the research is very incomplete.

Of the other two you mentioned, I only have experience of Market Samurai. It does provide search volume data and you can also use it to analyse competition for selected keyword(s), but how it compares to others I cannot tell you. As to what is determined as best, I don't think there is one tool. It is more down to how you work and what works best for you.

Peter

Glad to hear it's been sorted William. Peter

Hi William

You said, " I looked into this, and I don't think this is the case because if i export a csv from Ahrefs, I can see the cyrillic characters" - isn't that what you wanted to do, i.e. see the Cyrillic characters?

Peter

Hi Auke

Yes, I use the XML format for creating sitemaps all the time. I don't use any other format for sitemap submission.

With your client is the sitemap they have up to date? Either way it would better to create a latest version in XML format. Maybe try this one:

http://www.web-site-map.com/google-sitemap.php

Peter

Hi Auke

Yes there is. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo follow the protocol specified by sitemaps.org which is XML. It's not that a sitemap in a different format won't work but you are best sticking with the convention that they agree on.

More info is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en

I hope that helps,

Peter

I agree with you Sorina. As I said, what Bryan is reporting is not really an issue of web spam, but using the Google web spam report might bring the two sites to Google's attention to at least look at the issue.

Without being able to see able to see the two sites and compare them to see if the content on both of them is substantially the same as Bryan has suggested this is a bit of a head scratcher. We can only speculate about, but I guess Bryan may not be too keen on a public forum to post the URLs.

Peter

Hi,

Directories of themselves are not bad.

I would say that provided the directory shows a clear track record for your industry and is not just lots of pages of links with no supporting content, then that still holds good.

I hope that helps,

Peter

Thanks both. I'm not able to check this now, but will do when I get back to the office and can access the account on a computer rather than on a tablet!

Much appreciated.

Peter

Hi Bryan

Have you tried reporting through Google's web spam report?

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

It's not quite the issue you have but it may at least bring the issue to Google's attention.

Peter

I love that last paragraph! An admission of failure... just in case!

Peter

Hi Vlad

You could search for use of the link, e.g. https://www.google.co.uk/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FFu-z_yFmgLE which will produce results, but in terms of embedded use I am not sure.

Peter

Hi Vince

I have not used this company or have any experience of them so cannot comment specifically.

However, with so many sites having been slapped by Penguin due to issue with backlinks that Google have judged to not be natural or paid for, then I wouldn't risk acquiring links from anywhere for my site or those of my clients.

My recommendation is to grow links naturally by creating great content that people want to link to and if you have time by creating your own links in places you can validate. You only have to read the number of posts on this forum alone from people with sites that have been slapped to understand that undoing what's not been done correctly linkwise can in some cases be unrecoverable and at best it's hard work.

Just my thoughts but I hope they help.

Peter

Hi everyone

Trying to sort out a problem for a client who has one Google Places account for their business, but in the account there are two identical listings for the one business. Of course I could delete one of them, but I am concerned that in doing that - because they appear to be drawing data from the same source - I will also delete the data for the other listing.

Has anyone seen this issue before? Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Peter

Hi

As an interesting free tool have a look at Ubersuggest which pulls keyword searches from Google Suggest.

KeywordEye seems to be talked about a fair bit in my circles recently, but I haven't used it before. It's a subscription tool.

Market Samurai is a download and install, pay once tool that's been popular but I don't hear it talked about so much these days.

I'm sure others will suggest some worth looking at.

Peter