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Nice vid, thank you for creating!

If both your Yext and Moz listings match, it won't matter, as the citation information will be correct no matter who they prioritize.

Thank you for your response. It appears the best way to go about this is to make the main site amazing and optimize it around what they sell, correct? This is what I had in mind, but just wanted to check with the community to be sure.

I agree, as sometimes the topics get buried and are hard to find, or are not exactly relevant to the question that needs to be asked. Also, if you add a new question it's more likely to get seen, especially if people unsubscribe from the older post due to not wanting to receive responses.

Hello fellow Mozzers, had a quick question.

So we have a new eCommerce client that is interested in launching a website in multiple countries. According to their vision, they want a US site, UK site, Japan site, etc and so on.

I have a few concerns about doing it this way.

First, there is the issue with the sites being the same. They only difference will be that they have a different domain, such as domain.co.jp for the Japan-based site, domain.co.uk for UK, etc.

Even if we target different countries in webmaster, won't the sites still compete with one another and potentially get tagged as duplicates?

I'm thinking there has to be a better way to have a site targeted at the world, without having to clone and duplicate and relaunch. Anyone have experience with this?

1. He is the main lawyer at his new practice, but he also has one other.

2. We do not have access to the old listing. We contacted Google and they were able to tell us that the listing is owned by his old partner's email address (yikes!). They didn't exactly split on good terms, so I am hoping that Google will be able to release the listing so we can claim it.

Once we are able to claim, should we just delete it entirely? Would this action remove it from Google maps completely, or just mark it as closed?

This is a bit confusing to explain so bear with me please.

We have a client that used to have an old law practice with a partner. The site and backlinks were very large and it had a lot of domain authority. It also had a very large citation profile and history.

The two lawyers have since split, but there remains multiple Google Places listings out there for the old partnership. We have fixed the one showing the old business practice name, but not the one that he setup for his personal name. One of the biggest hassles is that the old location he setup has his attorney name in the actual listing.

The issue is that we cannot close the old listing (we tried this), as it comes up permanently closed when you Google his name. If you search for his new Law Firm, the correct business listing that we have set up will show. The new listing also includes his name and has over 50 five star reviews. We hoped that the large amount of legitimate reviews would get rid of or at least suppress the old listing, but it is not happening.

So I am a bit confused as to what to do. If we close the old listing Google shows the red "permanently closed" listing when you Google his name. We cannot update the old listing information to show his new address as then it will compete with the new listing that we setup that shows all the positive reviews. The old listing was not created by us, and the new one was. The new one shows when you search for his Law Firm name in Google, but not for his personal name i.e "NAME HERE ATTORNEY" or "HIS NAME and LOCATION"

Interested to hear your thoughts. The only way I can think to fix this is to contact Google directly and see if there is a way to permanently delete the listing from Google maps, but I am not aware that this is possible.

Miriam,

Thank you for your reply.

They are about equal in terms of location. While I can't supply specific details, they are both located well within the "border" of the major target area. Geographically, Google should be able to interpret their business location and apply it to the desired search area.

Under normal circumstances, I completely agree. The largest roadblock is the client in this case, and that we are allowed to edit very little in terms of content and focus, and especially visual. At one point we had the site ranking higher with a slightly more aggressive use of keywords, a cleaner visual design, and he had us revert the entire site back.

It is my hope that would could use this method to sidestep the client (although he knows that the domain choice is an option and has approved if we deem it necessary), but also add more location and keyword "targeting" for the business and website.

Sent you both domains.

Some of the titles may have changed recently as the client has access to the site 0_o

I find it hard to believe that a site with that few pages and that small of a backlink profile has been given the green light. Call me crazy, but I think it has to do with the "exact match" of many of his elements.

1. Business name matches keyword phrase
2. Domain matches keyword phrase
3. Business name can be listed on site as name, meaning keyword repeated over and over without penalty.
4. City is listed 55 times on home page
5. Corporate is listed 33 times on homepage
6. When I search for the biggest keyword phrase, the competitor's entire domain name is bolded.

I am wondering if since we have so many of these other items in place for our client if that would catapult him to a higher position? I know the person who built the competitor site, and he is known for the quick "clone, wash, content, repeat" method of launching sites. All using the same EMD method and they do great.

I agree the "I" word is a stupid choice, but the client is very particular in the way he does things. Switching to the new domain name would remove this issue.

Sent you a PM with the link and details. If you can offer a response I will share it here minus the client info.

EGOL, thanks for deciding to chime in. Please see my responses below:

"When you redirect this site about 10 to 15% of your linkjuice will evaporate in the redirect.  When you change this domain you will no longer have people typing your domain into search, typing it into the broswer window, all of your brand mentions will be irrelevant, people will click your old brand links and say WTF when they land on an unfamiliar landscape.  This is like sacrificing a lot of SEO, a trusted brand and walking away from your tribe."

We will do a sitewide redirect that states "any traffic to domainA.com/subpage will go to domainB.com/subpage". All pages will go to the new version.

HIS BUSINESS NAME is the keyword. This helps him in maps, search, etc. It's seriously driving me crazy. I'll send you a PM and you will see just how Shi**** this other site is. Its wild that Google is even allowing it, much less promoting it higher.

Yeah, EMD's are a pain, BUT they still work! Crazy.

Yes, they have the service areas listed in their site, and they have a great citation score.

We have already submitted the other site to Google twice for 2 different reasons. They are not responding to any of our requests. Some of the backlinking sites even have a score of 5 and 6 in the Moz link spam indicator. It's maddening that they allow this site to stay in number one and two positions with this type of behavior.

We have recently switched them to https and are now contemplating switching the domain. Everything else we have tried. Editing content, editing settings, compressing load times, fetching and submitting, etc.

The other company's name and domain is LITERALLY the entire keyword phrase. Google is eating it up, and that is hard to beat.

So we have a client that has a ton of great links, solid social profiles, content with good keyword-to-content ratio (7.5-9%), etc. This site has been around for a while and performed well.

Recently a new competitor showed up with a very long keyword driven domain and has been outranking our client (and everyone else) for a large quantity of keywords. We own a keyword driven domain that could be used, but should we switch? I am always for branded domains vs keyword, but in this case it appears to be working and undefeatable. We have waited for 6 months to see if it's a fluke, but it has only gained additional ranking.

The site in question has bad backlinks, many spam items, and stuffed content on the homepage. We will not copy that format obviously, but should we take one more step and beat him at his own game?

Our client has Yext Premium, MOZ local, AdWords, social paid campaigns, location targeting pages, fast load time, etc. Overall a good presence. He seems stuck around the 3-5 position on page one, and is looking to push into the top 3 consistently.

Thanks for the reply.

The files are not blocked, just highly compressed (and some are set to cache). I wonder if they are getting confused when trying to read the files...

We use a few compression tools to help speed up slow underperforming sites. I have seen a few messages in Webmaster tools stating that "Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files". Question is: Does this matter? Can this hurt the ranking potential, or is this a warning for best practices that is open to speculation?

Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files

I saw this and thought it might be related: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fluctuations-continue-likely-not-penguin-21489.html

yes, they are accurate. Again just last night I looked at the latest ranking reports. We had a powerful keyword fall 31 places for no reason. The site was not updated, the content was not changed, the listings were not updated. None of the competitors edited their sites, its just very strange. You can argue that the content should have been updated, etc but I am also seeing keyword driven domains coming back, spam sites taking the place of branded sites, its crazy.

We had another main keyword fall 34 places. true we had others move up 1-4 places across the board, but this is consistent for other accounts. Slight movements on some, then a massive drop on others for no reason. These are also items that have ranked for a very long time with everything being done correctly.

What the hell is going on? Is this what we can expect from Google's new learning machine? If so, oh boy.

We are not using Wordpress for any of the tools, and all will be handled using PHP. This is a separate directory from our main site used strictly for the tools. Our main site does not use Wordpress either.

The server resources are not an issue at this time, as we have a very powerful setup.

I am not worried about how many times a subscribed user wants to ping their site. I am more concerned about where the ping is being sent out from and how many times.