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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, Don. Would this work if I have a separate H1 tag for each version as well? I want Google to recognize each H1 for each version and not get confused as to which headline is a priority.

Regards,

Dino

Setting aside my personal issue with Google's favoritism for Responsive websites, which I believe doesn't always provide the best user experience, I have a question regarding duplicate content...

I created a section of a Wordpress web page (using Visual Composer) that shows differently on mobile than it does on desktop view. This section has the same content for both views, but is formatted differently to give a better user experience on mobile devices. I did this by creating two different text elements, formatted differently, but containing the same content. The problem is that both sections appear in the source code of the page. According to Google, does that mean I have duplicate content on this page?

I have a client in the junk removal business and I can't get him to show in local for junk removal +city. Junk removal is not a Google Plus category so we have to choose Garbage Collection Service, which everyone else does as well. I've optimized the site and the local listing pretty well, much better than the competitors, but we're still not showing.

It's not that we're asking to rank better, we're just trying to get on the list for the one term that makes all the difference in this business. I feel like there's a junk removal party going on and we're not invited. I've thought about a possible over-optimization penalty, but there's no G warning or message and we use fewer keywords than our competitors and have no spammy links as some of the competition does. Some companies that are no longer in business are visible. I just can't figure out what we might be doing wrong.

Any ideas or suggestions I might have missed?

In mobile search results, many of my inner pages show the title tag, but the link is removed. And instead of showing the meta description, there is the following:

May open the site's homepage
Try anyway | Learn more

Both "Try Anyway" and "Learn more" are links. Try anyway used to link to the homepage, but after we removed a redirect plugin and got rid of all the html mobile pages (now we're just using the Wordpress responsive layout), the link is now going to the correct page. So, it in fact, does NOT "open the site's homepage" any longer. But, we're still seeing this on mobile searches for our inner pages. It's been almost 3 weeks now.

Any ideas on how to get this back to normal?

I want to figure out why a lot of my pages for my website are not getting indexed by google.  I have installed the SEO plugin by Yoast to my wordpress website.  Under the titles and meta section of the plugin options I have set categories and tags to noindex.  In WMT, google is saying that all my category pages and most of my tag pages are not being indexed.

I want to make sure that the reason these pages are not being indexed are because of the SEO plugin.  I want to prevent duplicate content so that is the reason I have set my categories and tags to noindex.  Please respond if you know the absolute answer, its very important that I have my website indexed the proper way I want it to.

One of my clients wants to link to the same page from several places in the navigation menu. Does this create any crawl issues or indexing problems?

It's the same page (same url) so there is no duplicate content problems. Since the page is promotional, the client wants the page accessible from different places in the nav bar.

Thanks, Dino

Right on! Thanks for the tip. Since most of my clients are service based, I'm wondering if it would work as "http://domain.com/services/specific-service..."

Working on it now and will let you know.

Dino

Hey Max, did you ever get the stars to show in search? I'm trying to achieve the same thing for my clients, but so far have been unsuccessful. One client has a competitor who has stars for all their pages so been trying to figure it out. I think I have all the right markup, but so far nothing...what a mystery.

Regards, Dino

One of my clients has chosen a new domain for her website so we will redirect the old domain to the new. I understand that once redirected, most of the authority built up over the years for the old domain will pass through to the new domain. Is this correct?

Can this be done through the Wordpress dashboard, say with a plugin perhaps? I have a plugin called 404 Redirected I was going to try to use for this purpose.

Finally, the client has other domains (5 total) she has used for one reason or another. She wants to consolidate all of them and have everything redirected to her new domain. Do you see any downside to this in terms of crawling, Google trust and authority? I know there are some user experience issues to deal with, but we're addressing those. I just don't want to do anything that may cause Google not to trust the new domain.

Thanks, Dino

I appreciate the responses, but my website shows only 2 external links. My business is listed in almost 80 different business directories (with links) and Moz can only find two? Yes, I have Yelp reviews and Moz can't even pick up a Yelp link? It can't find links from Google Plus, Yahoo, Twitter, Yellowbot, Citysearch, merchant Circle and all the rest. No links from the dozen or so press releases I submitted a couple of months ago. No links from the handful of guest posts or article posts I've done.

I could live with a few missing links. I know some are hard to pick up, but Moz is missing more than 90% of them. I don't see the virtue of this tool.