Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Do you have any notices in GWT Katie?

In addition to what Gaston says, check out this Whiteboard Friday by Rand - What to Do When the Wrong Page Ranks for Your Keyword(s).

sponnu0123,

They show up for me. I searched for "dermatologist 10004" as well as "dermatology 10004". Wall Street Dermatology ranks #1 in the local pack for both phrases.

Hi Rajaindiain,

Here are some excellent resources I think will help answer your questions.

• http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049167/Content-Syndication-How-to-Get-Started
• moz.com/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
• http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/04/04/how-to-use-hashtags-to-increase-your-online-presence/

Good luck!

Moz and other tools aren't able to pull the meta description? I can see the meta description when I view that page using the Moz toolbar. It also gets picked up when I scan the site using screaming frog.

Do you mean it's not displaying as expected in search results? If yes, that sometimes happens b/c Google chooses other content from the page to display if it thinks it's more relevant.

Oleg's observation is a valid one if only part of the meta description is getting picked up and displayed in search results. I've seen that many times. Here's what the Moz Meta Description resource page says about meta description limitations (about 3/4 of the way down the page):

"Quotes Cut Off Descriptions

Any time quotes are used in a meta description, Google cuts off the description. To prevent meta descriptions from being cut off, it's best to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from meta descriptions. If quotation marks are important in your meta description, you can change them to single quotes rather than double quotes to prevent truncation."

Also, if the meta description is too long (cutoff somewhere in the 150-160 character range), it will get truncated. Your specific example is 156 characters.

Does that help? If not, please elaborate and perhaps some different insights will be shared.

Character width is now a consideration when deciding what to put in your title tags. Keep that in mind too. I think the pipe most likely consumes the least real estate.

Hi xlucax,

You ask a question that does not have a simple answer. There could be many things impacting the slow rendering of your website.

I can see it is a Wordpress website and fortunately, there is much help available. I have curated a bunch of tools and articles on Pinterest that will help you diagnose opportunities for improvement and pull together a plan to speed the site. Here's a link - https://www.pinterest.com/beseenontop/speed-up-your-website/. Then, if you have specific questions, feel free to come back here again and ask.

If you're looking to hire someone to do this for you, Moz has a long list of recommended companies. Start there.

Good luck!

Don't start out trying to be all things SEO to all people. Find your niche. What subset of SEO are you passionate about? What are you particularly good at? Where is there a need?

If you have a reputable and respected SEO firm in your neighborhood, look to get hired. Ask for a mentor. Learn from him or her and thru osmosis.

Edited now that I've seen Patrick's response which I agree with and want to elaborate on a bit.

"... if an external site has more than one link going to your site, then it is only the one link that passes value. " There has been some discussion of that point in the past. This is the most recent I found and I believe it is still accurate.

Moz best practices for anchor text also touch on your point.

1. Yes, but it the anchor text of the first link that will count most.

_2) _Yes, because the link destinations are different.

3) It's possible those links will boost rankings indirectly IF they provide sticky traffic, not not by virtual of the links themselves. Sticky traffic is traffic that doesn't bounce.

I think you're doing the right thing by optimizing for the grammatically correct version of the phrase. Google undoubtedly considers the phase without tones a semantic equivalent. If I were you, I'd focus instead on earning more and more authoritative links to the page so I have a better chance of outranking the ones that are optimized for the term without proper tones. If you can, try to get links with link text that excludes the tones.

Don't understand what you mean by a "dead link with # symbol".

Regardless, I misspoke. What you have with your current structure is NOT overkill. (I was looking at the line below, what you were considering as an alternative, when commenting.)

You only have "st-louis" once in your current structure. I say leave it as is and don't incorporate the city name again in subfolders and file names.

You should include St. Louis in the page copy and meta data and, from your example above, I can see you're doing that. You're on the right path.

Dreamrealemedia,

Use the Enable Media Replace plugin by Måns Jonasson. It will swap out the old image for the new, update all your links, and you'll be good to go. No 404 errors.

Please share if you identify any good ones. I know I'm interested and expect others would be as well. Brest question!

You should definitely cancel it Andrew. It's not worth it. And not easy to cancel. Go to Yahoo help and type SLN14163 in the search window to be taken to a page with cancellation instructions. Intuitive right?

That index query returns dubious results. URLProfiler wrote an excellent article last year sharing the results of some experimentation they did around the accuracy of that command and other tools used to help determine the extent of your site indexation. I recommend you give it a read - http://urlprofiler.com/blog/google-index-checker/. It will take some some work and access to their tool, but I think you'll gain a lot of insight.

Good luck!

You're right. If you removed the redirects, there's no need disavow. I assumed that was what you had done to remove the links given you said you sold Site A.

In my personal experience, it can take Google months, up to 8 months, to drop links. Hopefully in your case it won't take that long.

It's a personal choice but I don't see any harm in leaving it activated. I think there's more of a risk that tables will get corrupted if you are periodically deactivating and reactivating but that's just my opinion. If it's a concern, you would be better off posing your question to the plugin author.

The meta keywords tag has no positive ranking value. Some folks believe they "do no harm" so fill them in just in case. I think if you read thru past Q&As on this topic, you'll find that a majority of the knowledgeable folks in this community believe it's not worth the effort of populating meta keyword tags unless you want to play games with the competition and distract them with meaningless or conflicting keywords.

If your website auto generates keyword tags, just leave them blank.

Just to add to Dirk's response,

Adam Melson at Seer Interactive wrote an excellent post called "Link Building Guide: When You Have No Links". Check it out.

The other thing I'd like to note is, you should plan on spending the same amount of time promoting your posts as you do writing them. And yes, depending on the level of competition you're up against, it can take months or years to gain meaningful traction.

It sounds like it might be a theme setting. Some themes come with their own baked-in SEO functionality that can be turned off or on. I'd check that first.