Welcome to the Q&A Forum

For my Adwords campaign, I create a separate landing page for each Ad Group, but are similar enough to one another that they may be considered duplicate content. Should I use a canonical tag on the page to tell Google which page is priority? I don't care about any of those pages ranking in search, I'm just using them for my ads. I also don't want to redirect, clearly. Is the canonical tag the correct way to go?

@Paul  "I always include the publish date in the post itself because little frustrates me more than not being able to tell whether an article's recommendations are current or not."

WORD

Yes, it's a single word. My keyword is "locksmith" and locksmith is in the domain. Shouldn't locksmith be counted as 1 keyword in URL? Same thing with the keyword "heating" when heating is in the domain, but it's not showing in the Onpage Grader. Having the same issue with other clients.

I've noticed that the Onpage Grader is not including my keyword in the URL when the keyword is in the domain. If I grade an inner page and the keyword is in the sub-directory, it finds it. Is this intentional? If so, why does the grader not include my keyword in the domain as Keyword in the URL?

Thanks for your responses. Yeah, it sounds circa 2010-2011 - all the spammy SEO tools to try to game the system; however, as I mentioned in my OP, I'm not pursuing this at all, but trying to find out if anyone has heard of it. As Cesar mentioned, it doesn't even make sense; hence my confusion. I, too, am amused by the scientific description to try and make it sound cutting edge.

I've been approached by another SEO about incorporating a system that uses dissociative embedding, but have never heard of it before. I was wondering if anyone else has. Here's how it was explained to me...

"...dissociative embedding technology, we are able to attract the attention of the search engine crawler quickly, ensure that it takes note of a particular ‘link’ or external reference but does not actually associate or ‘store’ any pertinent data about that external reference within the database for long-term comparative analysis which could result in a negative penalty." and,

"...offsite site-mapping technology which incorporates our dissociative embedding engine to gain the attention of the search engine spiders while still avoiding any long-term, traceable negative side-effects."

We're not going forward with this for our marketing so don't need advice on that, but just wanted to know if perhaps the description sounds familiar to anyone.

Thanks Miriam, I've been working on the citations and many of them should be updated very soon. I will complete a full audit as it turns out the company was once a general contractor, which may be where Google is pulling much of their information from (yes, the importance of accurate citations).

All that being said, after I updated the category yesterday, big surprise, client is now back in local for Junk Removal, less than a day later. First problem solved, now on to those citations....

Thanks again for having a look and for the kind feedback.

Regards, Dino

Miriam, so sorry for not responding sooner. I don't know why I never saw your response when you posted it (just thought everyone was ignoring me). I'm overseas at the moment (Indonesia) and internet connections do some really funky things here. I know it's been awhile, but thank you for the response. I'm still having the issue, however, but you've given me some things to check out.

Here's the client: http://ezcleanupphiladelphia.com

Regarding the categories, Junkyard, Salvage Yard and Auto Wrecker really don't describe his business. I do like the other category you mentioned, Garbage Dump Service, but right now, Google isn't showing any local results for that search (from where I'm sitting).

But check this out... I went back into the dashboard to see what I could try and discovered that the primary category had been changed from Garbage Collection Service to General Contractor! Ugh. I have a team who has been helping me so now I have to find out who's been messing with it. I'll repost to this thread if it comes back.

Thanks again for your thoughtful answer, Dino

I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more.

I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so....

What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor.

Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.

My developer (in training) figured out a solution to eliminate the duplicate content; however, I'm still wonder if having two H1 tags (one shows on mobile and the other shows on desktop) in the source code will hurt my SEO. I usually like to stick to one H1 so there is no confusion for Googlebots. Here's one of the pages in question:

view-source:http://new.brooklynmanhattanlocksmith.com/services/automotive/

Thanks for the help! Dino

Thanks for your responses. Yeah, it sounds circa 2010-2011 - all the spammy SEO tools to try to game the system; however, as I mentioned in my OP, I'm not pursuing this at all, but trying to find out if anyone has heard of it. As Cesar mentioned, it doesn't even make sense; hence my confusion. I, too, am amused by the scientific description to try and make it sound cutting edge.

Yes, I think you are right. Thanks for the response.

A client site has thousands of pages with unoptimized urls. I want to change the url structure to make them a little more search friendly.

Many of the pages I want to update have backlinks to them and good PR so I don't want to delete them entirely. If I change the urls on thousands of pages, that means a lot of 301 redirects. Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?

Thanks,

Dino

SEO works fine for me, though I would guess since you've tried "everything in the book" that you've been reading the wrong book.

I would suggest you try Adwords since that's where Google would like to push everyone, but Adwords is a hell of a lot harder than SEO. If you can't make it here, you certainly won't make it there. My clients do well in both organic and paid search simply by using many of the principles that most people in this form are familiar with. It's not rocket science, but indeed, you have to follow the right advice, "read the correct book," metaphorically speaking. Find out what your competitors are doing and do it better. Then double the effort so they can't catch up.

I can't tell you whose advice to follow, but stay away from gaming the system and build your business with sustainable practices and you'll get there. I'm new as a Pro Member, but from what I can tell SEO Moz is right on the money.

And by the way, one of my clients is in the top 5 most difficult industries for SEO and in the toughest market in the world. They're consistently on the first page for their #1 search term so I know it still works. Hope you stick with it.

Was researching this same topic and the video you shared answered my question. Thanks for including the link.